JoannaDark

you are so right. my apologies. how embarrassing.

for sure! off the onion rings too, i'm sure they're still there if you wanna go for it

for serious? i was joking. sozzles. to make up for it, have this disgusting hipster piece of crap offering from kotaku: i hated fake games WAY before it was cool to hate fake games... http://kotaku.com/5830298/video-game-snobbery-started-a-long-time-ago

i heart this pigeon. so who's ever tasted the german delicacy known as leberkasse? (i'm sure my spelling is wrong). it means livercheese. tastes just as good as it sounds. Mmmmm, leberkasse.

yes, yes they are. i bit a piece of batter off of one, vomited in my mouth, and left the rest on their wee rack thing. terrible hangover food, onion rings.

what a fun thread! this is what i look like last weekend with a hangover and an unsympathetic friend who (wrongly) thought fried food and photographs would help...

haha, we're all being so careful yeah that's a big issue, women more likely than men to use mental health services, but that's only one of VERY many issues that mean women have, for instance, more insomnia (sleep is affected by hormones, sleep is associated with higher anxiety which is more common in women) but you're right, and there is a lot of research on this gender bias in approaching or accepting services behaviour.

it's a real issue. i used to work in game research and most of my results were based on male undergrads between the ages of 18-25. obviously that's expected and it would be somewhat difficult to even out the balance (Although now i know that sal limones is actually a girl, maybe i'm wrong ) something like colour blindness is at least obvious to most people to be biologically determined. where this sort of thinking IS a real problem is in other, potentially more emotive areas. i'm now working in the mental health sector and it's a real problem for things like insomnia, depression, anxiety, etc which are not neatly spread 50-50 across the genders. you can't ignore the fact that you're mostly going to be treating women and that this may be a helpful point to disseminate in terms of policy. you'll get all sorts of accusations as a researcher for looking at things like cognition and finding gender differences, but the onus is then on researchers, i think, to try and explore findings like these and figure out the why, rather than ignoring the issue altogether. it's not like i, as a woman, WANT to publish things like 'women are bad sleepers and have ALL the mood disorders and also we are cognitively impaired', more so, i want to be able to understand why this is what i'm finding.

So, I just downloaded onlive and it's got me, purely on the prettiness of the interface (so, so shallow) I'm running 20mb on a (infant) macbook and so the demo's (i tried A v. P) are running beautifully, also ten dollars for a month seems ok to me. a lot better than the time i got gypped by Big Fish games for 8GBP a month without realising i'd subscribed (i just wanted to play hotel dash...for shame) at least this is upfront, you know what you're getting into. before i subscribe i just want to look into the cancellation process, but i'm pro-onlive right now.

I'm mostly getting the impression here that while everyone is essentially on the same page as regards 'inequality is bad, m'kay', regardless of its form, I can't help but feel that we're missing something central here. men and women ARE different, which is why we have different likelihoods of claiming on our car insurance, being recruited as SPEEEEHS MARINEs and having to disappoint Alan Sugar for 6 months or so. I'm not accusing anyone on this thread of doing so, but gender equality shouldn't have to be so reductivist as to say 'men and women should perform/be treated/act THE SAME in all situations'. The truth is that gender is a complex and pervasive factor in all areas of life and we can't hope to accomplish a non-patriarchal society by pretending that it doesn't have these effects. Rather, I suppose as with any societal issue, people are still sensitive of appearing chauvinist, meaning that we steer clear of making any differentiations between men and women. I have a slightly facile example of this in my workplace recently, where I was recruiting insomniacs for a study- women tend to have worse sleep than men (for a number of documented reasons) and my sample was 75% female in the end. I got lambasted by a research assistant saying that it was my duty to get a 50/50 sample so that my findings would be generalisable, but that wouldn't BE generalisable, women in the general population probably do make up about 75% of bad sleepers. To me this RA's attitude summed up the potential issue with discussing feminism - we can't circumvent inequality by just pretending the genders are the same. I also feel that this point applies to the racism debate. In trying to avoid appearing racist I feel that there is the tendency to deny any inter-racial differences, which of course exist.

aaaaaaaand all females have abandoned the feminism thread (unless i've made another gurlontheinternet error)

I will definitely do this for the deus ex offer. also STEAM KEEPS CRASHING MY COMPUTER WAAAAAI

what do you guys make of this? http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0405/breaking12.html recently two irish gardai (policemen) were recorded making jokes on duty about raping some female protestors at the Shell plant in Mayo. apparently, if you hear the recording, it's clear they're lampooning some other gardai who created a PR disaster a while ago by saying the wrong thing. These guys have been vilified in Ireland and an investigation was launched, but the complaint was thrown out. i'm so torn about this. on one hand, if they were lampooning, then it's essentially harmless and just a case of stupidity at being recorded during work hours making inappropriate jokes. on the other hand, if this is a single entendred, straightforward joke about raping some 'crusties', then i find it really disturbing that there has been no disciplinary action for this. on the (3rd?) hand, there's something incredibly irksome about the EVIL RAPIST POLICEMEN LET OFF SCOT FREE attitude that most irish people appear to be adopting around this issue. thoughts?

none taken at all, i definitely wasn't getting involved at all, just having a bit of banter. in terms of contemporary feminism caitlin moran makes a really intelligent and coherent argument, essentially boiling down to, "we're all actually feminists, unless we actively go out of our way to suppress women purely for being women". that's a pretty small pool of people. I don't see the point in arguing semantics. i've never, ever interpreted something said to me as chauvinist, but then, to be blunt, i have a really good job and a lot of qualifications, and i almost exclusively work with men. so i probably don't have much to say on the matter, society's done alright by me

can we take a brief pause from the subject matter at hand to just admire toblix's english? for a non-native speaker, i mean. you have better english than i do. props.