Katze mit Wut

Nachdem wir uns beim Vorbeigehen mehrmals wunderten, was denn das für ein komischer PC Laden bei uns um die Ecke ist der nicht mal Schaufenster hat, kam letztens die Erleuchtung.

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.

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.

Der Telegraph meint, einen Trend zur kleinen Brust ausmachen zu können.

Meh. British chic catches up with continental standards, 20 years late but moving fast. Film at eleven.

Man mag mal eine Ausgabe English Vogue, French Vogue, German Vogue und American Vogue ("bloody Abys- bloody -synian bloody Vogue, darling!" — Italian Vogue lassen wir mal außen vor, die hat sich ja inzwischen zum Schimpfwort unter Feministinnen gemacht mit ihren Gewalt gegen Frauen-Fotostrecken) vergleichen, am Besten aus dem selben Monat, das ist instruktiv. Ebenso ist es interessant, US BH-Grössen mit den deutschen zu vergleichen, sowie die Präferenzen unter den jeweiligen, haha, Herren der Schöpfung. Zum einem ist der "goldene Bruststandard" im englischsprachigen Raum nicht exakt derselbe wie in Kontinentaleuropa. Wenn dort also korrigiert wird, tangiert uns das nicht notwendigerweise. Erstens generell, und zweitens, wenn ohnehin nur in Richtung "unserer" Standards korrigiert wird. Zum anderem ist in Grossbritannien gerade eine Saison mit Lack und Latex und gewissen Schnitten usw. usw. durch, also das was böse Zungen hooker chic nannten — das ist schwer zu steigern, und ich bin nicht überrascht, daß jetzt etwas anderes dran ist, etwas mit weniger "display" z.B. — Mode ist ohnehin reichlich fragwürdig, aber dann eher "immer und überall," als nur dann wenn Frau B vom Telegraph gerade mal meint, nicht die Zielgruppe zu sein.

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

This post/thread says it all, so, rather unusually for this weblog, I'll let the quotes speak for themselves:

The conservative-sexist metaphorical framework of sex is Sex As Conquest. […] Sometimes the struggle over the pussy is between men (ex: jokes about fathers guarding their daughters’ bodies from young male interlopers) and sometimes women themselves are tasked with defending the pussy from sex. If sexual intercourse happens, by definition, the man who gets to fuck the woman has won and the defender (father or woman herself) has lost. Sex happens when women surrender, in this model.

The liberal-feminist view of sex is that it’s not a war or a game, but more of a mutual collaboration, less like a battle and more like playing music. In this model, to be a sexual person is to be a musician and sex is playing your instrument. Sometimes you play by yourself, sometimes you get with others and jam, and sometimes you actually have a band that you have a long-term relationship with. There aren’t winners and losers, but there can be good and bad sex, just like there can be good and bad music. […] Homosexuality creates a lot of grief to those who have a fairly strict conservative view of sex because you can’t even tell who’s supposed to be the offense and the defense. It’s simply outside of their model, and it creates cognitive dissonance, which often makes the person suffering it want to wipe out the source of the dissonance. […]

The conservative-sexist model of rape is the same one used to define a foul in basketball. Basically, when sexual intercourse happens, the man team has scored a point against the woman team. Each team is allowed some strategies and disallowed others. In basketball, you’re supposed to snatch the ball from the other team, but you can’t cross certain lines or you’ll get a foul. This explains why rape trolls are so eager to find out what the “rules” are, i.e. when they are permitted to force sex. (”Is it rape if she’s drunk? What if she says yes and changes her mind? Is it okay to bully someone into it, so long as you don’t actually hold her down and force her? Are guilt trips okay?, etc.”) If there’s some ambiguity when the referee calls a foul, your teammates (other men) are supposed to clamor to your defense, regardless of whether or not you actually fouled. If the foul is called, then the woman team scores a point (or a free throw in basketball, but you get the idea). The idea that it’s wrong to have sex with someone unless she really, really wants to do it makes about as much sense as saying that you should only be allowed to get the ball in basketball if the defense hands it to you.
[Amanda, continued below the fold]

"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.

• I updated the weblog (but not all of the existing articles yet) to use tags rather than categories. English, German, and French remain as categories (as people are actually using them). Uh, speaking of which, s9y always requires an entry in the "default language" for multi-lingual entries? (If not, tell me how — it's certainly not something that is intuitively obvious at one in the morning, especially if you use the multi-lingual plug-in in conjunction with the multi-version plug-in.) And it uses the browser default language for setting the interface language, but not for selecting the entries? You gotta be kidding me. (And yes, it works here, duh. No need to write a comment. I mean seriously, what did you expect from me?) On a related note, am I the only one who found it much easier to do make the change to tags over in the mysql client, rather than in s9y's UI?

Below the fold: gripes about web-boards, web-shops, Mozilla Thunderbird, and new old plug-ins for the Beryl window-manager.

Und wo ich gerade dabei bin: für KDE gilt ähnliches wie für den iPod — schlechter als andere ist es wahrscheinlich auch nicht, aber es sind doch noch deutlich mehr Ecken und Kanten dran, als man von einem "Produkt" erwarten würde, das solche Lobgesänge erfahren hat und seit so langer Zeit mit soviel personpower beharkt wird.

Fetischismus funktioniert ja so, dass es ein Ziel gibt, Erfüllung zum Beispiel, den Soll-Zustand. Dann den Ist-Zustand. Und dann den Fetisch, der die Brücke zwischen beiden sein soll. So ist das in der Religion. Und auch bei sexuellen Fetischen, an die die meisten jetzt wohl gedacht haben. Und auch Werbung funktioniert so, auch wenn man dort natürlich ein eigenes, anderes Vokabular benutzt — es wird ein erstrebenswerter Zustand, irgendein generalisiertes Symbol (Glück, Gesundheit, Reichtum, Familie, Schönheit, Sex, …) postuliert, und dann das Produkt als Fetisch etabliert, als Brücke zu diesem Ziel.

Und da kann man dann allerlei Soll-Ist-Divergenzen beobachten: die Unterschiedlichkeit von eigenem Leben und dem angebotenen Traum. Die Verschiedenheit vom Fetisch den man erwirbt, und dem den man präsentiert bekam — oft hilft es viel, Qualität zu erwerben und nicht billigen Scheiß, aber dennoch erwirbt man üblicherweise nur das Produkt, dessen Inszenierung ist im Preis aber nicht enthalten. Man bekommt den Lamborghini, aber nicht die leeren Strassen und den Sonnenuntergang. Man bekommt den Ferrari, ist aber trotzdem nicht Magnum. Kurz, beim Muskelshirt werden die Muskeln nicht mitgeliefert. Und dann ist da noch der Unterschied zwischen dem angebotenen Traum, und den eigenen Träumen. Und um den geht es mir heute.

My new work machine arrived last week, a Dell Latitude D820. Let's take a look at the adventures of setting it up for work (Windows, Linux, Windows running on linux (thanks to Xen), and assorted other fu).

You've read all about it elsewhere — the Spaniards sent home models with a BMI below 18, and while Spain may not be on the A-list of the fashion world, they're getting ideas in Italy and the UK. While it's certainly nice to be declared the new standard, I find this development worrying.