The Lunatic is in my Head

I am scared of my family right now.

My immediate family are largely good people who generally behave with kindness to all, and abhor the concepts of white supremacy and fascism like any decent person.

My aunts on my father's side are pretty awesome. Hippie Uncle is great, and Woodworking Uncle has good intentions and maybe a few distortions due to assorted experiences of privilege, but he does not appear to go out of his way to fuck other people over.

My aunt-by-marriage scares me. She's a doctor, and things she has said about transgender people, and gender in general, make me feel unsafe around her.

My uncle who is married to that aunt has good intentions, but does not appear to be in a position to temper his wife's attitudes.

"Racist Cousin Anna" has said some things about Mexicans that made me turn away from her. She's married to the older of that uncle's kids.

Both those cousins have posted things about guns and Muslims on Facebook that make me scared, like they wouldn't hesitate to support laws that would marginalize my friends, or might use one of those guns on someone.

I don't have the scariest family in the world. And I'm still skittish of saying anything that might prompt them to stop seeing me as their tame cousin and start seeing me as Other.

Had dinner with Purple & Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly last night. (She disdains labels, but there are a few that fit well.) The topics of discussion included politics. Purple is the sort who generally holds most politicians in a similar class of petty evil, but he is sufficiently appalled by the president-elect (and was sufficiently appalled before the election).


But, this being our group, some levity must come at some point or other.
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Everything is, in fact, better in the morning.

[re: previous entry. (Locked: basically, anatomy of a serious mood crash.) Though the lawmakers in question, if violence did solve anything, I would cheerfully take the most embarrassingly longest and most virulently pink toy out of my collection and thwack each one of them over the head with it. On public television. Streaming live on the internet. However, violence does not solve anything, and tickets to Washington, DC are not cheap.]

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Tuesday, 0029: We had takeout dim sum for lunch today, and that was good. Mmmredbeanpaste <3
• Tuesday, 0857: I'm watching this on streaming video. <3 <3 <3
• Tuesday, 0859: All-star musical lineup!
• Tuesday, 0903: rahmbamarama brought down their cluster I think!
• Tuesday, 0906: crying and laughing all at once.
( read the other 28 )

Follow me on Twitter.

11:45 AM 4/20/2007
WTF, McCain. Come break time, my outraged constituent mouth is going to be on the phone to your office. There are funnies that are funny. There are funnies that are not funny. Yours was a ha-ha-only-serious that leaves me wondering if national security wouldn't be better served by throwing you in a large, deep hole without communications facilities. You could hang out with the Shrubbery and Dick, who belong there as well.

You're a presidential candidate. Everything I say about watching your mouth in public if you're a prominent internet figure goes double for world leaders and potential world leaders. Thanks for letting us know what you really think, so I can vote against you in all upcoming elections.


12:29 PM 4/20/2007
wild_rhythm pointed me at the Wikipedia entry on LJ this morning. One of my unstated life ambitions was to be a primary source in a scholarly work of some sort. I have no idea how long that's been there, but even if it disappears fifteen minutes from now, I will have had my fifteen minutes of having been a cited source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livejournal#LiveJournal_and_advertisements


2:00 PM 4/20/2007
*facepalm* Dear self, news is not efw, and it is probably bad to play there with beckyzoole as if it were. (Still and all.) (And I'm far too used to writing oo as 00, which could have been bad.)

My dizzytired is starting to go away. Yay dizzytired going away. Soon with the lunch. Doing manual update of thing, because that's the sure way to get it done within a time limit. Dammit.

Oh, breaking_nano probably just broke again. (breaking_nano is the canonical RSS feed that breaks on a regular basis and floods the friends page with old posts.)

I'm resisting the addition of 'flist' to my vocabulary. I'm attempting to not refer to it that way in writing, even if I do refer to it that way in my head. Referring to things that way in your head can be a bad thing.

Pink Shirt Guy did have a heart attack. There was a vein-clog, which was chemically dissolved. He's now going to be under observation and resting for a while, and plans to return to work next week if all goes well.


2:43 PM 4/20/2007
Insanity. This is going to be the sort of week where I'm glad it's over.

Here's a link that's been going around: Should LJ have copyright-like rights over your fanfics?

First: I don't believe that LJ would ever choose to exercise the limitations on original content contained in the proposed new WIPO Broadcasting Treaty. However, the proposed new WIPO Broadcasting Treaty is a very real problem. The Electronic Frontier Foundation doesn't like it. Intel doesn't like it. I don't like it. Note that these lists of stuff have concerns I had before reading the EFF commentary, and concerns I had after reading the EFF commentary.

Why I'm not worried about LJ:

• Reading EFF: this is about sound and images. The vast majority of the stuff on LJ is text.


• ( Read more... )


• Reading EFF: This seems to be primarily aimed at video media, from the language at the EFF commentary. I'd be worried about places like YouTube before LJ. But if they come for our video and no one speaks up...


• Bottom line: I trust LJ.

Why I am worried about more than fic and things other than LJ:

• ( Read more... )


• Reading EFF: This is aimed at "sound and images" -- video. The Intel position is that it would severely restrict private use of media, even private use that is allowable under copyright law. I join them in not liking that.


• Reading EFF: This would affect vidders heavily.


• Quoted from EFF: Proponents say they need this treaty to prevent "signal piracy." But the treaty goes well beyond that by creating rights to control "fixations" of broadcasts that only apply after you've received and recorded a signal. EFF and an international coalition of NGOs support a real treaty against signal piracy. We've drafted a treaty that does just that, but treaty proponents have refused to adopt it.


• Reading EFF: This would potentially restrict people's ability to skip commercials on pre-recorded broadcasts. I think that's the kicker right there. I think that's one of the major driving forces behind this. The market of commercial media is being shaken up by people refusing to watch the commercials that pay for it. Commercials operate by being annoying enough to stick in your head even if you're halfway across the house getting a drink during the commercial break. If you don't even hear or see them as background noise, all that money's up in smoke for them. And it looks like they're reacting by attempting to crack down, not attempting to re-evaluate the market and adapt to fit it. (If I were them, I'd go for more product placement, and putting watermarks on the corner of the screen like the channel does. And switch to wacky commercials distributed on the internet, with prizes for the most creative remix of the commercial. But that's just me. And is it just me who would like to see on every major advertiser's website a section on what ads they are running right now, both video clips and print? I would have loved to get my hands on an official copy of that HP ad that ran in selected bits of Europe, the one with the very happy bride wearing frosting. )


• In general: In LJ's TOS, it says that it has the right, but not the obligation, to crack down on any violations of copyright. Notice that language. That language is important. If that language ever disappears, and you're in any way dubious about the copyright status of anything you have posted, run. I don't expect it to disappear, because LJ does not want to have to devote staff to being Copyright Police. They have their hands full enough with "Hey, es* is using my materials without permission and I said "No!" and es said "Make me!" so MAKE ES QUIT IT!!!!" They don't want to go looking for wank. (That's fandom_wank's job, and they do it well enough for anyone.) LJ's statement on copyright.


• Bottom line: I don't trust other sites like I trust LJ. I don't trust mass broadcasting companies. I don't trust the mass-media coalition as far as an emaciated actress could shove my muscular plump self. This proposed little bit of legislation needs to stop, not because it'll give LJ rights it doesn't want, but because it gives mass media rights it doesn't deserve.

What You Can Do:

• Sign the EFF electronic petition.


• Poke your lawmakers. The US has been rather the loudest at the World Intellectual Property Organization on this front; it's time that they started listening to the actual US. Other countries that are a part of WIPO may be able to address their lawmakers too.


• Spread awareness.


• Correct misconceptions. I was very dismissive of this at first, because the angle I saw going around, without reading the context, was "LJ could have rights to my fanfic!" Because of the IRC channels I hang out in, I tend to take that statement with a chunk of halite the size of my fist, especially when I see an actual Six Apart employee saying that he does not want our fanfic, with the subtext of "Really, please keep the vast majority of your fanfic; have I introduced you to Mr. Cut Tag lately?" However, "The media special interests do not want you recording your favorite show so you can skip the commercials and plan to enact laws so you aren't allowed to, and legislate controls on technology so you can't" is far more accurate, and far more of a problem.

^* German gender-neutral pronoun, used in favor of "they" or "it".
Edited to correct some details.

Homer Eagles Will Be Beggars No More

Czech politics gets slap-happy

"A Very Long Summer": calathea writes a sequel to I Want to Go Home. Rudy Miller ... clone?! Rudy/Mike. Hilarious.

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/364.html -- bookmark.
http://www.trickster.org/kass/dream.html -- triofic, yum.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4879822.stm Zuma, you idiot.
http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/4925868.html cadhla encounters Coca-Cola Blak. No clear winner is determined. Except maybe her writing.

As I chatted, nearly singing, suddenly there came a ringing,
As of someone gently pinging, pinging at my fir'wall's ports.
Distinctly I remember, it was in that long September
That eternal, bleak September when morons flocked like flies on Usenet's friendly boards


Dear Mountain Dew,

Extreme sports are more fun as a participant sort of thing. I prefer participating in sports like Extreme Programming, except for that part where I don't like to share a computer. (And Jackson Hole the sporting resort always makes me think of Jackson's Whole, and I think I'm staying away from anything that reminds me of that place.)

You're missing your target demographic,
the Lunatic


theferrett gets political, talking about the massed opinions of the US. I get political too, in the comments, and my thoughts on the war (rather not-PC for a Good Little Girls Raised Quaker) come out.


Pandora is awesome. I have to admire the sheer Geek of the Music Genome Project. These music geeks with too much time on their hands decided to go ahead and analyze songs for their component elements, and recommend stuff to their friends based on the elements in the favorite songs of their friends and similar elements they found in other random songs. Then they wound up taking it to the 'net. Much streaming internet radio has audible ads, which are t3h suxx0r. This does not, and it is a thing of joy and beauty unto the ears and the heart. (This has iTunes and Amazon.com search links for each song, and an ability to save a list of favorites for later perusal.)


I went Out today, for a new bus card, for the returning of slightly-overdue library books, and whatever other mild not-quite-trouble I could get into. This turned out to be clothing-shopping. I now sport a new skirt (tiered, comfortable cotton/elastic blend, ankle-length) and two new bras (also with a high cotton content). The bras, marvels of structural engineering that they are, manage to be attractive and comfortable as well. For the first time in far too long, there isn't uncomfortable plastic boning poking into my sides as the bra inevitably twists around. (Some bras without underwires have side-boning, which can get painful.)

The skirt is gorgeous. It's full. It swishes. It's not quite full enough to swirl, but it gives the illusion of being able to do so. It's full enough for me to pose in my usual tomboy poses and not have it ride up to my knees. ataniell93's discussions of fashion have been rubbing off on me and resonating off my childhood reading (the Little House books, Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, et cetera) and reminding me that short skirts do nothing for my legs and less for my hips, and long skirts make that glimpse of well-formed ankle and calf that much more tantalizing.

The Politics of Housework

I recognize too much of this from when Marxdarx was living with us. Unfortunately. I think part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the line between "working on 3D stuff at home" and "playing around on the computer all day" is rather ambiguous to the untrained observer, especially when 80% of the time when the untrained observer pokes her head in, there's a game or some random internet site open rather than the 3D program.

That is not a current issue, though, and it's still too recent for me to talk about the time period without bitterness. Honestly, he'd not have been more than a dubious roommate if not for the conflicts over the Little Fayoumis. I took my duties as a full-time aunt seriously, and I keep wanting to have been more.