Bjorn

So we took a long break from watching this. I think the whole Zhaan thing was actually a bigger blow than either the lady or I originally thought. Following that, we both just kind of quit bringing it up, plus we had a bunch of games from the holidays to play and that took up a chunk of our leisure time. But now we're back to watching it. This show just really does revel in putting its characters through serious emotional trauma. And speaking of that, Scratch n Sniff (S3E13) is now one of my favorite episodes. Not that it's technically the best, but similar to the comment I made around the end of Season 1, I needed some Farscape weird to breakup the more serious stuff, and this one is just delightfully weird. It's interesting how almost impossible it has become for the Moya crew to actually operate in a real society. Between their reputations, their legitimate craziness and pre-existing personalities, they just can't manage to go for more than a few hours without screwing something up. And in other shows where that might eventually feel forced, it feels like their natural environment. To contrast it to another Star Trek episode, I love how this is basically the Hunter S Thompson version of Captain's Holiday.

On the violence of the oppressed, something else to think about is scale and perception. The violence from the oppressed is often magnified and blown out of proportion and used to discredit all activism, while the violence from the dominant culture is nearly invisible, and when it is noticed, its role in systematic oppression is obscured. So by discussing or turning the focus of a conversation to the violence from the oppressed, it can help to keep the much larger violence invisible. Obviously that's not always the case, but it often is. So when people express frustration with the violent vs non-violent activism conversation, I think a portion of that frustration lies with the decades (and ongoing) blindness turned towards the violence of the dominant culture.

I think this may be the first time I've ever seen a PC gamer complaining about a game's boot sequence/logos being streamlined and shortened after first boot. At least there's not a splashy, 10 second long Disney logo (unless there is, in which case )

I just saw it used for the first time in the last week, and was really, really hoping it was a joke. And then I looked at #likeaboy hoping it was a joke, and while there are joke tweets, sadly there are plenty of serious ones too.

I saw that this morning as well, and couldn't decide what the hell I thought of it.

So apparently "meninists" are a thing, and #likeaboy started trending last night as a reaction to the #likeagirl commercial.

I actually find that stuff kind of interesting, as I have very low level of fear of spiders or snakes (they can surprise me if I don't know they're there, but otherwise don't scare me). So hearing people try and explain their fear, or find a source of it, is somewhat enlightening. And the sound of the one co-host walking in with the python while the other was on mic had me laughing so hard I had to pause the episode. My dad had a habit when I was younger of catching bull snakes to transplant back to the farm house (there was an old farmer's myth about bull snakes chasing off rattle snakes, but I don't know if that's actually true). But he'd usually walk around for several hours with it wrapped around his arm before going back to the farm, and scared the shit out of a bunch of people that way.

Actually, in what has to be one of my least expected developments in gaming, the PC has really become the king of local multiplayer. I wouldn't say it's a great fit for a young child (the Wii U is still likely the better choice there), but for general local co-op support, PC gaming has just been amazing the last few years.

So far it's very much an extension of the TAL pick-a-theme-and-explore-it-from-multiple-perspectives blueprint, with some of the more sciency aspects of RadioLab mixed in. But it's got a different personality to it (naturally, due to different hosts), and competent shows in that style aren't something I generally get tired of.

Being a self-employed/small business owner blows some days, spent a chunk of last weekend and all day today doing a bunch of tax and bookkeeping stuff I don't have time for during the regular work week.

So, a podcast with Jonathon Coulton as the co-host and in-house musician sounds like a great idea, but so far Ask Me Another is just another terrible public radio humor show. However, Invisibilia (another new show with ties to This American Life) is fabulous.

I thought last week's WRUP post on Joystiq was a little weird, now I know why. Well played Alexander.

Same time period in my life. Too much freedom, but not enough brains/control. Some people just don't survive that. Honestly, I think I'm lucky I did, looking back. I did some dumb shit, especially if it involved fast cars.

I've hit max score (which you have to die to save it, or it rolls back to 0) and I've hit its equivalent of a "kill screen" (which isn't actually a kill screen, but it rolls over to a glitched stage 1 or 0 or something). I've only ever done the Kill Screen thing with a partner though, trading back and forth because of the time it takes. My brother and I did it a couple of times back on an original machine in the late 80s. I was kind of obsessed with Galaga, only one of the old arcade games I ever got that good at. I had a shitty few years with death from 95-99. I lost more people in those four years than the rest of my life combined. And just random shit, mostly car crashes, but a few other causes as well.

I used to have recurring nightmares about some of the people I know who've died, by far the worst nightmares I've ever had. They weren't violent or anything, but something about them freaked me out more than anything else. I haven't had one of those dreams in a decade though (thank heavens). Apparently I'm pretty good at Galaga when I'm several Strongbows into an evening. Got to Stage 37 and beat the current high score on this machine without too much trouble, before getting a bit bored and going back to hang out with people at the bar we were at tonight.

Unnnnnnngggghhhhhhhh.....fuck.

Actually, I'll correct myself, I *think* was asked more neutrally than that (like who lies more, men or women?) and I botched it when bashing that out unthinkingly. But the whole segment was still bad, with one male panelist declaring women definitely lie more, the woman saying she didn't want to be answering as the token woman speaking for all women, and then it was about women lying about orgasms. The whole thing was just unlike any other exchange I've seen in the last two weeks. The episode is here, this whole part takes place in the back half of the second segment.

Ah, of course, I should have assumed as much. FWIW, please pass along my well wishes to your boyfriend. Aaaaand, in the condemning corporate shitlords sentiment, the editor of Massively said goodbye, but this point is infuriating (emphasis mine):

On the PC discussion, this is an interesting NPR piece about a study that looked at creativity and work in mixed gender groups where PC was brought up, and where it wasn't, found that PC groups actually performed better (which flies in the face of people who decry the destructive force of political corectness). As noted, it's a small, controlled study, but interesting nonetheless. This comment at the end though is probably the truest comment on it. Okay, and on a different subject, has anyone else been watching the Nightly Show? For now it's replaced my lunchtime Daily Show watching, as I'm appreciating having something new to watch. And by and large I've thought it's been a fabulous first couple of weeks to the show. But I just watched last night's, and came away super frustrated. It was about Deflategate, and lying in sports in general. Then towards the end of the second segment, the panel somewhat bizarrely turns to the question "Do women lie more than men Who lies more, men or women?" and that almost immediately becomes a question about women lying about orgasms. It was a weird turn for the panel to take, particularly when you've got 4 dudes and one woman talking about this. No one ever asks a guy about men faking orgasms (and that does happen). The whole thing was doubly compounded in the next segment when a dude objected to the question he was asked, and Wilmore dropped it saying maybe it was a bad question (even though it was a good question that just made the guy really uncomfortable because it was about his employer). It just showed a deference to a man getting uncomfortable directly following a segment which likely made at least some viewers uncomfortable (the woman on the panel was a pro and rolled with it, but still). Hopefully it was just a bad segment and not indicative of how future panels will go. But still rubbed me the wrong way.

So it's officially official about Joystiq, though apparently the name/content will be rolled into Engadget? But Alexander's tweet to a list of linkedin profiles looks like almost the entire (or it is the entire) staff is done, so that's basically meaningless except for the name kind of surviving for awhile. Hope everyone lands on their feet as quickly as possible.

Cooking with little kids is the best, it's fun rather than a chore (cooking with teenagers is the worst, everything tastes like drama and angst).

Every single fucking morning for breakfast.

I also find that children make excellent tools for the most onerous of kitchen tasks.

I don't watch very much SVU, but the few episodes I have watched have generally seemed decent. And in a similar vein, Belle Knox wrote last year about the episode that drew on her for inspiration. SVU does seem to present ideas that most people aren't used to thinking about in ways that give a ton of weight to victims. So there's some hope for a decent episode.