silveradept | Entries tagged with shadow idol

Being the Only Black Kid anywhere means people treat you like you represent all Black kids, which can lead to being thought of as not black enough by some, too black for others, and nowhere do you get treated like an individual who happens to have pigment. You become the Token Minority Pal that others use to try and excuse their racism, an exotic curiosity to the otherwise very whitebread community, and so forth. It's the inverse of the No True Scotsman fallacy - instead of redefining everything to exclude people or actions you don't want in a category, it's redefining everything so that so long as one person in the group thinks its okay, everyone does.

Despite not being black, I know that what's described in that post is true - I just got to see it from the white, small town, religiously conservative point of view. My provincial upbringing was in a community that was pretty unconcerned about its diversity. There were the adopted Asian kids, but not a whole lot of people of color while I was getting my federally mandated education. While there were gay students at the high school, it was something that was Not Spoken Of seriously, no matter how obviously they were signaling such things.

And then, in high school, we got our own Authentic Real-Life Black Man (TM). Who we promptly assumed would be trying out for the basketball team, had an excellent collection of rap and hip-hop (if he wasn't part of an underground rap crew), and were probably bombarding with questions about whether black people really were $foo, $bar, and $baz. And possibly wondering what sort of behavior or criminal activity they had done that warranted their transfer.

There's a reason I don't like my provincial upbringing. A more cosmopolitan atmosphere might have helped prevent that monolith-izing. University was excellent for dispelling the monolith. In addition to their reputation as the liberal campus garnered by anti-war protests, my first year in the dormitories introduced me to a man attempting to be a walk-on to the university football team, a very large black man. He could also play an extremely mean game of Super Smash Brothers, would make fun of the hockey advertisements, and had a copy of a PlayStation 2 Final Fantasy game. And thus, there was not just the Only Black Kid in my life, thank Prime. I learned that people are not a monolith. And much more kindly than other people do, considering all the possible ways I could have learned it. There were also plenty of other cultures I received exposure at university, too.

University also gave me a solid grounding in cultures and politics and the ability to see them good and bad. Because professors will answer you honestly if you ask whether all the Abrahamic religions have justifications for aggressive violence, which makes a strong point that anyone concerned about "Islamic radicalism" as some novel thing should pay attention to. And they will trace out the history of the use of the word "witch" and show how many times it gets used as an exclusionary and ostracizing word, making the accusation of magic more a social issue than one of devil worship. (They also teach you about ha-satan, The Adversary, whose job it is to provoke The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton into all sorts of unjust things so that he can make a point about how even divine beings need reminding about justice. And forgiveness. And how he eventually morphs into Capital-S Satan, The Devil.) You learn that some romance languages are sexist in nature, because while some of their words will change their suffixes based on gender, there are others...that don't. If you want to indicate a woman in a traditionally male profession, sometimes you have to say "woman [job title]." Which is something that basically calls out the oddity, the weirdness, the apparent contrary nature of someone in a profession not set for them. It cuts both ways, too - "guybrarian", for example, indicates that men are not traditionally in the library profession, and thus become a novelty.

It's not the same as being the Only Black Kid, not to the same degree. But I know a little bit, now, of what it's like to be the only person in your cohort.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Holst - Mars, the Bringer of War

Ever walk down (or up) a set of stairs in the dark, or with a full armload of things, and step off the last stair, onto the ground, expecting one more stair? It's very disconcerting. You're certain there was one more stair there, you planned for the being one more stair there, and yet, no stair. Most people can relate to this idea in their lives - planning for a disaster and having it all go quite well, instead. It can make someone feel a bit foolish that they were worried about certain variables and they didn't come into play.

Other people looking at it from the outside might comment about the ridiculousness of the situation, because they could see the want of a stair there, and yet it seemed like someone assumed the was. He's the thing, though. Most people who expect the extra stair usually do so because they've tripped over it more than a few times. The person who is a great worker, but never seems to speak up,and wise ideas always are more popular when someone in Management parrots them? They've hit at least once missing stair, and probably the one called Patriarchy. The missing stair is pretty insidious when it's going to affect someone with regard to their job - it's not possible to watch it for it all the time, especially if you've been dealt a manager that deals in caprice and hearsay. Those people who are forever worried about getting in trouble have probably had the missing stair put in front of them for them to trip, and/or yanked or from under them for them to trip. Creativity suffers in that kind of environment.

If only there were ways of protecting people from those kinds of shenanigans that were easy to deploy and that could swiftly gather the evidence needed to prove the malfeasance. Like a collective group of workers that kept an eye out for each other. And laws that didn't permit employers to fire someone for any reason at all, including the paper-thin disguises that often appeared as proxies for more substantive issues.

If only.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Yasunori Mitsuda - Dragon God

Welcome back to Shadow Idol - same prompts as the LJ Idol, but not necessarily on the same schedule, and there are no eliminations to have to worry about.

Here's the topic: Jayus - a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.

There are several I can think of off the top of my head. Here's one: Did you hear the joke about the conservative party that believes the poor should die if they can't afford the cost of health care?

Or the one about that same party that thinks it's great to make women drive hundreds of miles to get family planning services, because they believe that all doctors performing family planning need admitting privileges at a nearby hospital?

Or the ones that say women need special insurance in case they get pregnant and need to terminate their fetus, and that the only people who can get that special insurance are those already in employer-provided health care?

I could go on all night about just that one conservative party. Not that what passes for the liberal party is that much better - they're not the kind that torture women for kicks, sure, nor are they the kind of people that would pass laws making being QUILTBAG a crime (at least, they aren't now), but they're definitely all on board with the idea that other countries should defer to them in how to run the world. And they're certainly not agitating for upending the social order that puts amoral corporations in charge of democratic functions. They happily seek solutions that leave the corporations in charge and bring them new customers by fiat, because they don't always appear to believe in what their values supposedly are. And they're far too willing to go to war than they should be.

Jayus is politics, as anyone who has to deal with it quickly realizes.

Jayus is also my own provincial upbringing, the kind of place that had quite the buzz going about when an actual black person moved to the community and started attending school. (Oh, the stereotypes we had.) Where nobody was openly gay or lesbian (although there were plenty of people who were very close to out), but there was plenty of joking about people who were, and crude remarks about masturbation using soda bottles, because no man could satisfy that particular ice queen. The one that didn't laugh at the misogyny.

The place that took the fictional organization NO MAAM - the National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood - and proudly displayed their logo in one of the classrooms.

It instills a desire to be unique and different than the generic default, because they get noticed and you get forgotten, without serious thought to what the consequences of being disprivileged are and how exoticizing others is just another way of Othering them.

Jayus is the joke that we can gather hundreds of thousands every week to watch collegiate football, but the people protesting the illegal war were less than ten at any given time. Jayus is the Pentagon budget compared to the SNAP budget.

Jayus is the joke where not doing anything and blaming the opposition for it is thought to be a serious tactic that will win votes.

Since they're not supposed to be funny, maybe we can stop telling them?

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Edvard Grieg - In the Hall of the Mountain King

Shadow Idol: The Chronicles Of S

Am I mentally disordered? No, we're fine. Why do you ask?

Well, at least I'm pretty sure we're okay. The DSM may disagree, of course, and it did up until very recently if you were gay or lesbian. I'm not entirely sure what it thinks about being trans*, and whether certain aspects of that identity are considered "disordered". The other letters of the QUILTBAG acronym could be there, too. We're slowly purging those items out, as more and more people demonstrate that they are quite normal and acceptable and advocate for the removal of stigma from their lives.

There's still a ways to go, of course. I'm sure the therians, the Otherkin, and a large amount of the multiple community are seen as "disordered" first, but there are more living those identities in the open and proving they are also just fine.

Kinky folk are becoming less closeted as well, although there's still a lot of kink-shaming and potential legal consequences to being kinky in the wrong environments, even if it is between two (or more) adults of the age of consent in private space (echo, echo, echo...). The wild success of Fifty Shades Of Grey suggests there's an appetite for things that look kinky on the surface, so there's some amount of shifting away from the idea that one doesn't talk about these things in polite company.

Science is helping us, too, pointing out neurochemical imbalances, under or over-developed brain regions, and a greater understanding of how environments have profound effects on people. We're getting a better understanding of what constitutes the things we consider "craziness".

Now, there's always something at the back of the brain telling us we're not good people, that we don't create, and that a do more harm than good on balance, because we can't be everything to everyone. There's the overarching worry that we will fail - by not making enough money, because of the caprice of a manager, because significant people in our lives are mad at us, however temporarily, or that we'll say something stupid and alternate ourselves from people we consider friends. These are not signs of mental disorder, of course because they don't have physical effects on us. (Almost. Because of the Capricious Manager and the Time Of Nearly Certain Doom, we still get triggered whenever the manager wants to talk to us, and there has to be a very stern internal fight to avoid careening over the edge into unnecessary worries.)

If I were properly honest, I'd probably have to admit that I show signs of depression. Or anxiety. Or both. And maybe other things, too. So, maybe not everything is all okay. But we're not mentally I'll, honest. I'm just fine, and most days it doesn't bother me consciously. So, am I crazy? Nah.

But don't mistake that for meaning that I'm completely okay.

This has been an entry for Shadow Idol, topic one: Am I Crazy?

----

There's a joke that I heard several years ago - it had both a misogynist and misandrist version, but the basic gist of it is that there's a department store where one can go to get a partner. It's laid out much like a multilevel Swedish Furniture Store - as you go forward, you cannot go back. The opening floors contain partners that are singly either brilliant, perfect physical specimens, or fabulously wealthy. The theoretical shopper looks over the merchandise and decides to go up a floor, where there are partners that embody two of the three traits. The shopper looks over these partners and decides to go up a floor. On the next-to-top floor, there is a small amount of partners that are all three of these attributes - fabulously wealthy, incredibly attractive, very smart, the closest thing to perfection that humans could get. Despite all this, the theoretical shopper goes to the top floor.

...it's empty, but for a sign. The sign says "You're never satisfied, are you? You had the option to have wonderful partners, but you kept going on, looking for something better. Now you're here at the top, and there's nothing for you, because nobody's perfect.

By the way, you're the [LARGE NUMBER] visitor here. Have a nice day."

It's the same idea in the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. The first goat says "You don't want shrimp. Throw the small one back and go fish for something bigger." The second goat says, "You don't want small fry. Throw the small one back and go fish for something bigger." And then comes the big goat, who turns out to be ornery and strong. The troll went fishing for the big one and then lost his line, his pole, and himself in the ocean.

It's a decision-making game every time - how far out do you go and risk, knowing that going too far will result in losing everything? And why do we have so many characters that seem to be on a line that insists you must trade in size if you want to gain cleverness? Mabela the Clever is the smallest of the mice. Anansi is a spider. Luke is short for a stormtrooper, and I think Kanbei is the shortest of the seven. Then there's the trope of the Big Dumb Muscle. And isn't akido or judo a really good art for someone small to use?

So I guess the strategy of throwing back the small ones seems to benefit everyone in their own way. How weird the world is.

This has been an entry for Shadow Idol: Toss the small ones back.

Current Music: machinae supremacy - attack music

I forayed into Nethack for a little bit. I find, upon reflection, that Nethack (and other Roguelikes) are and are not games. They're games, in the sense that you play a character and interact with things according to certain rules to achieve a goal.

The grand majority of the content of Nethack, however, is not a game. It is a logic puzzle. Each character starts out with some of the squares of that puzzle filled in, depending on their race and class combination, but the rest of the puzzle has to be deduced, experimented, and otherwise determined, often through trying something and seeing if it kills you, or doing something desperately when you're about to die and finding out that it actually worked. And then having to figure out which rules are permanent and which one re-randomize every time you die. (For figuring out the permanent ones, there's Wizard Mode, where you can't die, and you have an infinite amount of wishes. The devs recommend using this. They also recommend reading the manual, because it contains one of the most useful permanent rules in it. RTFM is a rule of Nethack.)

One of the most basic permanent rules of Nethack is one that Gauntlet has made memetic - "Red [Character] Needs Food Badly." Take too many turns without sustenance, and you will die. Thus, your character must eat. This, however, must always be taken in context - the Calvinball rule of Nethack is "The Devs Have Thought of Everything." And therefore, after you die from eating zombie or mummy meat because it is rotten, after you die from eating any corpse of a creature that can turn others to stone, after you die and are turned into a slime because, apparently, it's a swiftly self-replicating organism that overwhelms your very cells and replaces them with its own, you learn that you have to choose what you eat. And then you find out that eating certain things confers beneficial effects, which adds complexity to your diet.

As you might guess, most people give up on Nethack long before they get anywhere in the game because there are so many permanent rules that have to be juggled, long before one gets to working out the random ones. Those who spend a lot of time with Nethack realize, like any any computer simulation, some rules can be bent, others broken, and still others manipulated to the player's benefit.

But let's just stay on food for the moment. You see, The Devs Have Thought of Everything. Which means that if you can die from the lack of something, you can also die from its excess. It is possible to consume so much food that the character chokes and dies. It is at this point that the player learns that there are some creatures and things that are too big to consume.

Lest one think this is simply a cruel game that delights in the multiple deaths of its players (which it is), Nethack does provide hints to the player that they have done well or poorly in their decisions. (With one notable but important exception. Which can screw you horribly if you don't know about it and have an artifact that will lock in the beneficial aspects, if it's beneficial, but will also lock in the detrimental effects, if it's detrimental.) The hints, however, are not always clear. For example, if you have gained the ability to sense the presence of other sentient beings, Nethack will cheerily tell you "You have gained a strange mental acuity." And then leave it up to you to figure out what that means.

When it comes to choking, the hint only suggests that you're doing well in finding and consuming food, and that's it.

And that's one of the reasons why I probably won't ascend - because I've had my fill of games that obliquely hint at what the next course of action is, and that require you to juggle the knowledge of multiple factors just to stay alive, and that make sure each turn brings you closer to death, possibly even by factors that they aren't going to say exist until it has killed you. Nethack certainly exercises INT and WIS, but it abuses HPY and especially SAN. I guess I like my games to be geared toward success and achieving the goal, rather than trying to find as many ways as possible to kill you.

Which probably means that, at least when it comes to games, you can count my fandom as HEA.

This has been a Shadow Idol Entry for Topic 26: Sated and Topic 27: Once Upon A Time

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Frank Zappa - Central Scrutinizer

I don't self-promote much.

...says the blogger.

Well, okay, unless it's at work. Or related to work. At that point, I can wax enthusiastically about all the benefits that my work and my profession bring to the table. I can show you lots, tell you plenty, and be absolutely comfortable telling you about the strengths I have, that the system has, that the profession has, so would you please support us when we ask you to put aside a small amount of money to keep us funded?

Ask me professionally, and I can hit most of your questions out of the park. Those that I can't, I can at least put most in play, or just foul off until I get something I can hit. Occasionally I strike out, but it's rare enough that I can usually shake it off and go back to swatting the next pitch out for base hits or better.

Outside of that life, though, I'm not really one for tooting my own horn. I have conventional hobbies, like music, games, and books. Of the things I have renown for, well, most of them don't have physical manifestations. Others, well, there's always someone better, and for the most part, I've met them. When that happens, you tend to lose your frame of reference for things.

I think it goes a bit further back than that, though - lots of people run into the fact that there's someone better than they are, and it doesn't really phase them. For some of them, it inspires them to work harder. Let's spin the dial backward quite a bit, then.

Through elementary school, at the end-of-year assembly, I received the same award for many years in a row - "academic excellence". It's niceto know that people think you're brilliant, but even as a young child, I could see where this was going - typecasting. I tried to head this off at the pass as a fifth grader by specifically requesting that my award for that year not be "acadmic excellence." When the award ceremony came, I received praise for... "academic excellence and..."

I might mention that about this time, there were some new people into the school, and they had a more relaxed attitude toward scholarship. Later on, I would be told, when I was the new kid in school, that I exuded a certain amount of a superiority complex with regard to my fellows. (It culminated, actually, in a bit of a struggle where physics helped me have my attacker put himself into a fire extingusher. Nobody got hurt, thankfully.)

It was at this point that I was introduced to the idea of schadenfreude, although the actual word itself would not enter my lexicon for many years afterward. For it seemed like there were a lot of people who routinely took pleasure in the idea that I was wrong when answering questions. And then the group of gentlemen, ostensibly in a troop that was supposed to foster camraderie among its members, who liked to ask impossible or nonsensical questions, illogical followups, or deliberate misunderstandings, and then proudly proclaim their victory over my intellect. (Usually as I was trying to get to sleep.) All the while, I kept racking up the various class awards for academic excellence.

My summer baseball affairs did not necessarily result in feeling good in something physical - there was always someone better, it seemed, and I certainly didn't seem like a star as a power hitter or a fast baserunner. Or as a fireball-throwing pitcher, later on. I was generally the walking ideal of "a walk is as good as a hit" - I'd swing at the right pitches and let the bad ones go by. And I played a lot in the outfield - from what my parents and coaches told me, it was because I woud pay attention to the game, instead of being the child picking dandelions. (One double-play I was responsible for, they said, was me catching the ball and knowing where to throw it - thus, I was already making the next out while the runner was still marveling that I had caught it. Lucky me, my teammate was also on top of their game at that point.)

We'll skip high school, other than a quick mention of the fact that cynicism is a thing in high school - everyone wants their own outsider status and wants to not have outsider status. Even through university, I kept playing music and video games, and routinely kept meeting people who were routinely better than me at both. It seems like my efforts to avoid typecasting have failed to this point. Even now, people who I would expect to know better think that poking fun at me when I'm not right is a good thing, because "it's so rare" and I should be able to handle it.

There's a logical fallacy (at least, I think that's what it is) called loss aversion (or avoidance) - people, as a rule, will generally prefer safer bets, even if the odds, in the long run, favor the riskier choice - the possibility that one might lose interferes with the rational process of calculating which course of action to take to get the greatest gain. For most people, thesafer course of action is more palatable.

For someone who's feeling like they have one good thing about them, and who has already had demonstrations that people seem to enjoy it when they fail at that one good thing, the only safe place is on top. And not just on top, but on top sufficiently so that nobody can catch them, even if there are some mistakes.

So I don't self-promote much, because it gives the trolls the chance to disparage, and others the chance to ciritque, and maybe, just maybe, I'll find out that, objectively speaking, I'm not all that good. (Actually, I know this. I'm not Scalzi, nor Gaiman, nor Galenorn. I might not even be Fifty Shades of Grey.)

And I wouldn't out my own name on a love meme, unless things were really bad, because there's the possibility that I'd ask for a party and nobody would come. And doesn't it just make sense that really, if I were worth something, someone else would put my name in instead?

Have I mentioned that I tend to play many games on lower difficulty levels, that I don't like mostly luck-based games, and there are times where I feel like it's not worth the 1000 games lost to pick up the one win? The loss avoidance has crystalized into a bit of a personality tick. And that when the feeling of competence at work came crashing down, it really took hold, to the point of feeling paralyzed about doing anything for fear of the repercussions?

Yeah, hi, I'm Silver, and I'm a wreck. Probably mostly of my own making. But now things are returning to normal. Even if I still feel that it was luck and not skill that catalyzed the shift away from Doom. But every day that passes, there's even more that I'm doing at work that shows the skill has always been there. At home...gettng better. I've had other people in the group that I'm playing music with now tell me that things are actually pretty hard - lacking context, I thought the problems I was having were just due to my own lack of skill.

These days, I might even leave the difficulty setting on Normal. Mabye in the future, I'll be confident enough to put my own name in the hat, regardless of whether anyone shows up.

This has been a Shadow Idol entry for Topic 24: In Your Wheelhouse and one of the selections of Topic 25: Closer. This entry is probably also twice as long as it should be to make the same point.

Current Mood: depressed
Current Music: Gustav Holst - Second Suite in F, Mvt II

Neither of which involves me directly.

The first.

ilyena_slyph is helping someone,

killing_rose, escape a situation that is exceedingly corrosive to their well-being and mental health. However, she needs what funds can be spared to make this a reality.

For the full story, and the link to the donations page, this entry will give you all you need.

And then, the second.

whatawaytoburn, who is awesome in so many ways, is providing a place for people to say what they feel they're alone in, or to provide support and camaraderie to those who feel they're alone.

Such things as these, they are not much, but perhaps they will be enough to the right people. They're an example, I think, of the power of things like water - the weak force that eventually turns out to accomplish the task it set out to do.

I can only hope that they are not too weak to be effective.

(Prompt 23: The Weak Force, and yes, Silv's behind.)

Current Mood: depressed

Have you ever had a fruity drink? (And by that, I don't mean a euphemism for anything - a drink, alcoholic or non, that has actual fruit in it.) For some reason, those serving drinks, at least in a restaurant or other establishment, seem to believe that straws are a good thing to have with such drinks. Despite most straws being smaller than the fruit in the drink. (The one exception? Bubble Tea straws are designed to suck up the tapioca bubbles. It's sensible.) Which makes the straw good for creating suction to pull up the fruit with. And possibly to shoot at people, if you want. (Family tradition dictates that straw wrappers are the things that get shot, but these days, they're not all that prevalent. Ah, and that one does not cross Grandma when she pulls the waiter aside and says she's paying for it...even if Mom has done the same thing beforehand.)

Well, okay, there's one other reason for a straw, but truthfully, it could be served by having a swizzle stick accompany the drink instead. Something tells me, though, that swizzle sticks are not provided in bulk by restaurant supply stores and bulk suppliers. Even if they would be an awesome way of marketing your particular establishment to others by letting people take home their excellent swizzle sticks.

If this were a normal entry, I'd then transition from the personal and small to the bigger, less-granular point through the use of something possibly related - from fruit and straws to donkeys and elephants (and Greens and Tea, Constitution and others). Puns, hopefully clever material, and all sorts of things that get us from one topic to another. It's going from one variation on the theme to another.

Instead, however, we're going to stop on playing cards. Because just about everyone in my family plays cards in one way or another. We usually started with learning cribbage, since it doesn't need that many people, it doesn't require having a handful of cards, and the rules are both simple and complex enough to be learned and then analyzed for best results. (Kind of like Fluxx.)

Then there's hearts, colloquially "nasty cards" in the family, for good reason - we don't worry about the two of clubs, and occasionally we say "no, no points on the first trick" if we're feeling nice. And we end up passing cards to the right first, because it's a conservative household. Or so they joke. Except it isn't. (If you've played Bang!, that's a pretty good representation of "nasty cards")

After that, it's double-deck pinochle, with a slightly weirder-than-usual bidding system, I think, but one that does require keeping a handful of cards and bidding one's hand either acurately or pre-emptively, depending. (This is Dominion - with a few expansions.)

But there's only one, maybe two, of the people who play cards in the family that have gone on to doing the big game - where you not only have to bid, but describe your hand in detail to your partner, and then, assuming you've arrived at the right contract, play the hand out against the opposition. The one that does, does so regularly and has apparently acumulated some amount of ranking according to the federation. He and Dad tried to teach me the basics of the bidding when I was younger. I don't think I got much out of it, plus the counting of everything was just the beginning, and I was having trouble with just that. Plus, at the time, I didn't really see the appeal of the game. Kind of weird, isn't it, with all the other card games that the family plays with relish?

I still look in on the Goren columns occasionally, trying to see if there's any more magic to it than there was before. It's not there, but it does let me at least converse with those who do play the game and say it's excellent.

This is a Shadow Idol entry, for the partner prompts of "The Straw that Stirs The Drink / Bridge". It makes for a rather disjointed entry, but no challenge is too tough, is it?

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: "Jeopardy" - Final Jeopardy Think Tune

Many of us, when we talk about the past, want to say "I would never have supported the Nazis, or the racists in the South", or any of those groups for with we see the error of their ways in clear hindsight. The truth of the matter is that many of the people in the past that we condemn with our clear eyes were much more complicated than our narratives tell us. So, let's have a bit of an example. Everyone, put your heads down on your desks and close your eyes. I'll read a few statements. Tell me whether you agree with them by raising your hand.

The United States War in Iraq has been a failure.

The United States War in Afghanistan has been a failure.

Marriage between white and brown people should be outlawed.

(At this point, if there has been someone not following the directions of eyes closed and heads down, their name is invoked instead of a generic.)

Remember to keep your eyes closed. I'll do my best to make sure this is followed, but there's no guarantees that someone isn't looking and I just haven't caught them yet.

Let's continue. Remember, raise your hand if you agree with the statement

Every person deserves the right to marry the partner or partners of their choosing, regardless of their sexes.

Each person deserves to be recognized by the gender they choose, regardless of what their outward presentation looks like.

God intends for women to get married, serve their husbands, and have children to mother.

(By now, I am fairly certain that I would have a smattering of different responses, some who put their hands up, some who left them all down.)

Mm. Fair enough. Put your hands down, open your eyes, and raise your heads.

I can conclude, with reasonable certainty, that some of you would not have been fighting against the racism of the south, would not have been attempting to smuggle Jews out of Germany and other Nazi-controlled territory, and are not the civil rights pioneers that you believe yourselves to be, at this point in your lives.

How so? Because not everyone raised their hands on the civil rights issues questions after the first one (that's a control question, by the way), and not everyone kept their hands down on the women's issues questions.

This is not a reflection of your character, though. The way the questions and responses were phrased, nobody was forced to admit they were against a civil rights issue.

I reminded you a few questions ago that there was the possibility that your classmates were watching you secretly. For some of you, I'll bet you wanted to raise your hand, but if that jerk two seats down was watching you at that particular moment, you know that you wouldn't hear the end of it. And then, of course, there was always the question of whether raising you hand when the teacher was watching, or not raising your hand when the teacher was watching, was worth it. Maybe I would change your grades once I knew you didn't agree with me. That wouldn't happen. If it did, I would be fired, and rightly so.

You might have believed in the statement, but the peer pressure was too much for you to risk it. Peer pressure was there, too - if you were caught hiding Jews, you could be sent to concentration camps or killed. If you were white and seen as a sympathizer to black people, you could be fired from your job, ostracized from your social circle, and shunned from white society. If you were black and someone thought you were being an "uppity n-word", they could get friends to beat you or kill you, and the law wouldn't necessarily prosecute try all that hard to find out who did it. Does this sound familiar?

Standing up for someone else is always a risk. Sometimes it seems like the risk is too great. Some of you will work within the strictures of your social circle to spread tolerance and acceptance. Some of you will speak out against injustice, and be a visible and public presence for the causes you support. Some of you will be on the other side of that issue, with the counter-protesters and the people who believe that it's a "special rights" issue, because God-through-your-pastor said so, because your parents said so, because it's what you believe. If that's what you believe, though, you can advocate for yourselves without creating an environment of fear and hostility and without resorting to violence.

If you can only get your point across by hurting the people saying you're wrong, you've lost the argument. And as you do violence unto others, they stare at you, each asking you a question. It's the same question they ask of all the people who stand by and watch, either because they're paralyzed by peer pressure or because they secretly agree. "Et tu?" "Et tu?" "Et tu?"

When you resort to violence, it's only a matter of time before people look back at you and proudly declare that they wouldn't follow the path that you followed...while ignoring the parallels between their own issues and the issues of the past.

"La plus ca change, la plus le meme chose." Or, as Santayana said, "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Will you be repeating the past today?
-----------

This has been a Shadow Idol post, prompt 19: "Et tu, Brutus?"

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Seven Samurai - "Surely you must be joking". "No offense intended."

Penguin (publisher) rescinds its agreement with Overdrive (intermediary that sells e-book access to libraries) because Overdrive offered wireless delivery of Penguin e-books to Kindles through Amazon, something that Penguin says was not in their agreement with Overdrive when they let Overdrive use their books. The American Library Association, the Authors' Guild, and several other companies all provide their input, wanting to have a good model come out of it that makes everyone happy.

While they talk, though, there's a bigger problem that the media is ignoring, even if librarians aren't. Most major publishers aren't signing any access deals for libraries to get their e-books at all. It's not that they're saying "No, we don't like that platform", it's "No, we don't want to let libraries have access to our e-book and e-audiobook catalogues at all."

We have enterprising librarians developing scripts on how to have staff talk to users about the new restrictions as a stopgap measure, but all the focus is in the wrong place. We shouldn't be preoccupied with fighting over whether one vendor should have access to everything. That's just asking for something monopolistic, which will then turn around and bite someone in the ass when the monopoly decides to screw everyone else over for their own profits (looking at you, media cabals).

As things are right now, a lot of library e-book users don't like their current interfaces, and a lot of people who would use library resources, except they find them too difficult to access. Which suggests that there's a giant gap just waiting to be filled.

As Internet Wisdom goes, "Cheap and Easy beats Free and Difficult". As things are right now, we haven't managed easy in anything, only difficult. If, as libraries, we want to get into the e-content delivery, be it academic research journals, back issues of newspapers, or the latest in popular fiction, and we want to be able to send it to devices that people have that are built specifically for reading content (or listening to it), then it falls on us to try and find or design the simplest systems that we can. This gets complicated when you realize that most e-content is not sold, but leased - the owners of the copyright reserve the right to change the terms, add DRM, change DRM, and otherwise hold anyone who wants their stuff over a barrel for access.

How did we manage this sort of thing? Well, we can blame the software companies and their End User License Agreements. You see, with them, when we bought a copy of a program, we didn't actually buy the program. Instead, we shelled out a lot of money for a license to use the program - no reverse-enngineering, no improving, no using it for purposes other than what was spelled out in the agreement. In one notable case, no selling your copy to someone else if you don't want it any more. Thus, we don't own any of the software on our computers. (Mostly. Things like the GNU GPL and other F(L)OSS-type licenses do grant the ability to improve the underlying code, fork it, or manipulate it in ways that most commercial EULAs don't.)

That turned out to be pretty cool for the software companies. People still bought their software, and they retained the ability to dictate how the software was to be used. And then, I'm guessing, someone in another media realm thought "What if we could do this with other types of content? What if I could license people to be able to use music, but not to be able to make copies or share it with others, and to only be able to send it to approved devices that will do what we tell them to?" And thus, DRM music sites came into being. And crashed spectacularly. And DRM video sites came into being. And crashed spectacularly. And then resurrected as "streaming" sites where you not only had the DRM, but the would only play under certain plug-ins that didn't offer the ability to make copies or save. (Theoretically.) Which are doing okay in their own right, partially because their revenue streams are not primarily focused on subscription fees, but advertising at all possible places.

Now, however, we find ourselves in a world where, well, as an astute alien mentioned in My Teacher Glows In The Dark, "as technology advances, the technology to fool it advances as well." Technological measures like DRM are confronted with technological measures to strip or break the DRM out and leave perfectly usable files. Through technologies like BitTorrent, legally purchased music, films, and books can be traded across the Internet in relative anonymity. (And with the possibility that those people who want to stop such infringement have to participate in it to be able to see who is infringing.) The digital representations of content are proliferating in ways that their physical counterparts had to deal with decades to centuries ago. (The printing press and the idea of translating into the vulgar language meant everyone could own a cheap copy of the codex of Torah and the Christian Foundational Writings, and thus interpret for themselves, instead of having a priest interpret for them, what it meant. That was a big scandal, remember.) The world out there has both Free and Easy, If Illegal.

Which positions libraries in the place where we were before - as the purveyors of Free and Easy and Totally Legal, Too. How easy would it be for you to check out an e-book from the library, transfer it to your device, and return it if your authentication method was "enter your library card, and we'll send this wirelessly to your device using our public wi-fi." With the added bonus of "Keep it as long as you need to read it, and delete/check-in it when you're done." because the library actually owns the content and can send it out to as many devices as it wants. No waiting list for the latest thriller, because you download it from the library's servers. Content the library buys from magazines and journal archives is always there, even if the library eventually discontinues buying that content, because it's on the library's servers and we handle the authentication methods. Digital music content, movies, and albums available for checkout to your player device - keep as long as you need or until you buy your own copy. (Obviously, some limits would be imposed, but they would be of the nature of "only so much you can check out from us, sorry" and each library could set those limits themselves, rather than being forced to a certain amount by an outside vendor.)

I can see this being more expensive - after all, the publishers want to make a profit, knowing that the library is going to share their content with people who couldn't/wouldn't otherwise pay for it individually. So we negotiate site licensing for content, DRM-free, using our consortia and point out that we do have authentication methods. If need be, we share in the cost of buying server racks, content, and the IT people needed to maintain them, so that small libraries get access to all the big stuff, too. We develop apps and programs to make it easy to get the content, easy to track how much people have, and easy for them to check it back in so they can get something else. And we educate our users on what publishers are doing to them, and we educate publishers about the giant user base, possible sales, and trainloads of money that they could potentially get by licensing to us on our terms and our prices.

Instead of being preoccupied with how we're going to work with what's already out there, why aren't we designing the system we want from the ground up? Why aren't we hammering on the point that Neil Himself makes when he asks "How many of you were introduced to your favorite author by someone sharing a copy of one of their books?" Substitute movies, albums, bands, just about any creative endeavour - how do you know it's good unless you've already experienced it? How do you get more people to experience it? You have to let people share it. Instead of thinking of piracy as lost sales, think of it as the cost of introducing new people to your work. Some of them won't like it and will pass. Some of them will like it, but not enough, in their opinion, to pay whatever price you're setting for them to own it, so they'll borrow and/or steal. Some people will be introduced to something they've never seen before, that they really like, and that they're willing to throw money at to keep it alive and producing more. We have studies that point out people who actively share stuff with others also translate into owning more content legally. In some ways, it's a bit of a code of honor. F'rex, fansubs. It goes something like this: Watch fansubs until the series is licensed. Then, if you like it, go buy the officially licensed series so there's a better chance that more series like it will be licensed and so that the companies that are paying for the licensing can continue to do so. It's a feedback mechanism, and I suspect a lot of licensing companies do actually look at what's being fansubbed, even though they can't/don't admit to it.

Or, for an example that's entirely on the level - Cory Doctorow releases all his books under a Creative Commons license. That means they're free to read on Craphound. And thus, you know what the product is before you choose to buy it in a codex form...or you tell your selectors that this author is dynamite and we need to order copies for the whole library system. He gets sales of his books from people who would not have picked it up in a bookstore, sight unseen. He gets sales to libraries and schools, where people can pick up his book, sight unseen, evaluate it, and then decide whether they want to buy it.

When it comes to digital content, we're preoccupied in all the wrong places, and many of them have to do with a desire to stop someone else from sharing or improving upon what we have done. How much better would everything be if we decided to embrace the idea that people share things, like to improve upon them, and will circumvent stupid ways of stopping this, law-be-damned? For people who are all about The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), isn't this idea of unleashing the creative force what you want? The products will compete, and the best will be funded and sold, and then someone else will improve, and the wheel turns again. For those of us who are about making sure that we leave a rich pool of ideas for the next inspiration, and that inspiration isn't stomped on by restrictive licensing and corporate greed, well, copyright is intended to be a limited monopoly. If we can return it to that idea, we can ensure fertile ground for new ideas. And for those of us in the business of providing to people what they couldn't or wouldn't normally afford, what we've got to do is make things as simple as possible to deliver that content from publishers to the people that want it, and negotiate for fair pricing and ownership so that we can achieve those goals. Let's not get tangled in What Is, excepting as a stopgap measure to What Should Be.

(This is an entry for Shadow Idol, prompt 15: preoccupied. How much of what we do has been shaped and limited by forces that we don't notice, because we're too busy looking at something else?)

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Fergal Carroll - Winter Dances

Something that sets my heart a-beating, makes me flush in the cheeks, and gives me a feeling in the pit of my stomach?

That would be when someone thoroughly embarrasses me, accuses me of lying to get out of trouble, calls a meeting to deliver formal discipline, or otherwise engenders the feeling of "Aw, crap." in me. That's not a fun feeling at all, and if it happens at your workplace, the effects can be far-reaching. When it happens repeatedly, morale suffers. When it happens from a manager, despair sets in. And a few other emotions, too. But despair leads the pack pretty well.

Or that would be when someone is not just Wrong on the Internet, but head-deskingly, Worst-Person-In-The-World, ignorant of basic facts Wrong. Rage increases the heartbeat and bloodflow, after all. And when they're talking about your profession in such a way, the only thing stopping you from going full-out against them is the Internet Adage, "Don't feed the trolls." Or, put more colorfully,

"Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference." -- Attributed to Mark Twain

And when you represent The Company, they really don't want you going out and posting things, regardless of whether they make you look good or bad. Best to let the Community Relations people handle that, they tell you. Even if the blockhead in question is an elected official or a candidate for such. Perhaps especially so.

But wait, Silv, say some. That's not what twitterpated is! It's the feeling of True Love when you see your Destined Soulmate. To which the cynic says "Are you sure that feeling is originating in your heart, and not somewhere lower in the anatomy?" (Voicing that thought will often get you hit. Especially from someone who believes in True Love. Usually gently, thankfully.) I don't doubt that some people are highly compatible - I see it, so it can't be untrue. But a long-term relationship isn't usually days upon days of feeling dreamy about your crush. It's days of getting by, of annoyances, of fights and making up, of lust meeting "Not tonight", of shared pain, of conflict, budgeting, and a hundred thousand other things than romantic feelings. It's love, but it's also things that aren't love. No relationship is ever the idealized version of the Past That Never Was, not without an explicit consent to go there and put on those roles. (And even then, I suspect there are days where the role-playing just doesn't click.)

Ah, but there's not just gloom and doom in the things that manipulate our heart rate and our emotions. Gustav Holst, for example - Mars, the Bringer of War, Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, the Song Without Words. The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down. The Imperial March. Lady Gaga. Michael Jackson. Jackson Pollack, oh, and Playboy and Playgirl, too. The arts can still make our feelings different...or emphasise the feelings that we already have. They're one of the few ways we have to express our emotions to others. And yet, we don't carve out time for their teaching, we remove their funding from our budgets, and we make it difficult for those who want to spend their time in the arts to make a living doing so. We force them to chase megastardom, fame, or widespread commercial sales of their art just to be able to pay the bills. Or they find someone in their life with a steady paycheck to take care of the bills, which allows them to practice their art.

And something like that, which draws out the color of the world and removes the background music, is the opposite of twitterpated. There's no romance or love there, only the fluttering of a heart watching other great hearts put aside their passions for the necessities of the real world.

(This has been an entry for Shadow Idol, prompt 14: Twitterpated. As much as it might be fun to join the game now, there are still several things in Real Life that would preclude playing the game with regularity.)

Current Mood: bitchy
Current Music: Weird Al Yancovic - Happy Birthday To You

Mr. Feldman's Quiz always opens with the same set of categories. Mr. Packard has the recitation down quite well. "Current Events, People, Places, Things You Should Have Learned In School (Had You Been Paying Attention), Science, or Odds and Ends?" Of course, when you're playing the Whad'Ya Know Quiz, all of those categories are very different than your standard trivia department.

There's a lot of current events the U.S. media wants you to be paying attention to. The dog-and-pony show of electoral politics, where rich white men attack other rich white men for not being radical enough in their desires to roll back the safety net, deny women the ability to choose if/when they want children, make sure that the richest among us pay the least in taxes (while claiming that it's a problem that "half of people don't pay taxes"), and want to ensure that it's more difficult for the demographics that oppose them to vote against them.

...then again, that might be worth checking in on occasionally just to see which reasons you'll need to cite to oppose them with when one of them wins a nomination.

The U.S. media decidedly does not you want to think about current events involving people in the Middle East trying to get rid of dictators and strongmen, except through the lens of "Well, it's obvious hardline Muslims are going to take over in the power vacuum, so really the only question left is whether or not Islam is compatible with any form of democracy." They're making sure to not talk about the fact that they have several examples of functioning democracy where many if not most of the members of the government are often hardline members of Christianity.

...now that I think about it, maybe this government at this junction of Space-Time isn't the best example.

Ah, and speaking of the media, how big of a blind spot is there with regard to advertising? Just about everywhere you go, physically or digitally, there's an ad somewhere. Supposedly-objective newspapers, television news, and Internet sites carry advertising, commercials, and other means of revenue generation apart from subscriptions or access fees. And whlie most of us learn in school a little bit about being able to evaluate the claims of things like commercial advertising, we don't get the same cursory instruction (or any instruction at all) when it comes to evaluating the content of political advertising. Maybe a little bit about fact-checking gets picked up in other contexts, but one of the things we really should have learned in school (had anyone been paying attention) is how to evaluate the emotional context and content of ads. A slick liar who makes you feel like you're a patriot and your opponent's supporters are terrorists or worse will get elected, sometimes in spite of the fact that everyone knows he's a liar. The best ads aren't the best because of their factual content, but because of their emotional appeal.

Shouldn't we be teaching our upcoming voters how to figure out whether they're feeling good about this guy (and they're almost always guys) because of his policies or because his ads are triggering your emotional centers?

Of course, if we did that, we might have to admit to the primacy of the scientific method in disciplines other than the hard sciences. (Although, even there, there are people who demand that myth and religious belief be taught as scientific conclusion, rather than as myth and religious belief. While I'm all for cross-disciplinary work, this is one of those cases that doesn't.) That would mean acknowledging that marketing departments, think tanks, advertising agencies, and political campaigns all test thousands upon thousands of hypotheses on actual people every day, interpret the results, refine their products, and test again in an iterative cycle that could (and probably should) be used as the textbook examples of how the scientific method produces replicable results, which can be analyzed to draw conclusions and make a profit.

Far too many people don't see the application of science to their everyday lives - even in their churches and on their pulpits. Because they believe that they can't be swayed that easily, even as they have examples of just that around them.

Which leaves us only to mention that another thing that we really need to be better at is understanding risks and chances. Most of us are fairly innumerate when it comes to statistics, probabilities and the likelihood of events occurring. We think that when it says that we have a 1 in 3 chance of winning, it means that we have a good chance of winning the grand prize, when it really means we're likely to win the food prizes, if we win anything at all. We don't get why, when Monty (or Wayne, or Howie) reveals a curtain and says "so, do you want to change or not?", that the smartest course of action is to change your choice. We play in casinos and at lotteries, thinking that a dollar a week isn't a major investment for the chance of willing millions. We'll spend billions chasing "terrorists" and setting up chokepoints that would be much better targets for terrorists, all over one statistically unlikely event, when we're far more likely to die of an automobile accident or of an unhealthy lifestyle causing myocardial infarction. We're afraid of things that are spectacular, but otherwise rare, like lightning strikes, and utterly unafraid of the most common killers of people, like tobacco usage.

So, Whad'Ya Know?

(This has been a Shadow Idol entry for Prompt 13: Current Events. It probably wouldn't qualify under the official Idol guidelines for this week, but Shadow Idol doesn't have to follow all the rules when it doesn't want to, and I think this idea was too good not to write.)

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Dvorak - Symphony No. 9 "New World"

(This is the submission of an entry for a giant cooking carnival being put on by

commodorified. If you'd like to participate, the kinds of things being looked for in the carnival have been detailed. This entry is also pulling double duty for Shadow Idol, prompt 12: Some Assembly Required. Topic 11 was a free topic - choose whichever topic you would like in my history to count. In any case, feedback is appreciated, especially if I'm not up to snuff for what the carnival is asking for.)

Cooking! Such a wonderful thing. Whether you have a kitchen that makes the professionals jealous or a few pots and a couple bowls, it's possible to create all sorts of good food that turns out to be inexpensive per meal and per person when all is said and done. The perspective I'm going to come from is from the idea of a recent graduate of schooling who is now out on their own and has to figure out that cooking thing.

First and foremost, if you have a friend who cooks, whose cooking you like, and who is willing to teach, take advantage of them. This does not have to be someone close (locationally) to you - I learned a large part of my cooking technique from a friend who already knew how and was willing to write up some lessons. In-person cooking lessons are fun, too, if you can swing them. Picking up technique expands the range of things you can do, as a lot of cooking is variation on technique, where a step, spice, or time spent is different. (Plus, it makes cookbooks intelligible.)

What worked for me as a recent graduate was setting aside time to do cooking on the weekend. Taking an afternoon (or morning), putting on something that doesn't require constant attention (sport is often good for this), and doing preparation cooking often pays off in having more time in the weeknights to do other things, or in reducing the time that post-work dinner takes to create from an hour to fifteen minutes, making it easier to eat in-house.

One of the good tricks I learned from my friend in tandem with the idea of taking time to cook on the weekend (some of the cooking shows are starting to pick up on this) is that some things are bases for your dishes - add a different sauce, garnish a different way, or choose a different side / vegetable, and the same component that you made on Sunday can make enough dishes to last you through the week.

Ah, which reminds me - if you have the capacity to store it safely and the funds to buy enough ingredients, it might be worth your while to make everything for double the people that will be eating it. Rare were the times when I cooked enough for one person for one meal. More often than not, I cooked enough for one for two or three meals - which is handy when it's the morning and you want to take something for lunch - reheat leftovers in the company microwave, and I saved the cost of going out for lunch or getting takeaways / fast food. If you're not the kind of person who can stand eating the same meal twice in a row, then Monday's dinner could become Thursday's lunch - it means a little bit more prep in cooking multiple meals on your cooking day, but the payoff is variety in your lunch materials. (And the jealous looks of your co-workers as they see and smell your homemade materials.)

Most of us have a cookbook...or receive one as a graduation gift as a(n) (un)subtle hint about one of the responsibilities of adult life. And the good thing about those? They're full of all sorts of yummy (or yucky) things, just waiting to be discovered...and the best part? When you're cooking for yourself, the only person who has to decide whether your cooking was good or not is you! It's the perfect time to experiment and find out that you're obsessed with garlic, that cilantro tastes like soap (or doesn't, lucky you), that soy and teriyaki are a great/awful combination, and that if you roast the Brussels sprouts, then salt and pepper them, they actually taste decent. (Everything but for the soy/teriyaki combo, I've learned through cooking. Your mileage will vary.)

Finally, since I hate doing dishes (yes, even with a dishwasher - the one in my first apartment didn't work for squat), I find that there are ways of working with your recipes so that you don't have to use lots of pots and burners. If you know what you have to make, you can usually order the cooking of ingredients so that, for example, you cook the greasy hamburger first, then follow it with the onions that allow you to both infuse flavor from the hamburger and let the onion's oils de-stick the pan so that you can just spatula up the burger leavings along with the onions that are now ready. It might take a little trial and error, but a lot of things can be done in one or two pots, pans, or woks, and at the end, you find that all you have to do is rinse the pan and scrub it a little with soap. Cooking was always easier when I knew that cleanup was one pot, one plate, and one or two utensils.

Lest I seem like a nut about making sure that you always cook all the time, as a recent collegiate graduate, I always carried a couple meals per week that were deliberately ready to eat on short cooking time, or were the kind of meals that you would throw in a microwave or oven, set the timer, and walk away. The nutritional content of the meals I chose might not have been the best, but when I came home from a tough day at work and had no energy to cook, I could always toss something in the oven and go play games for the time it took to cook. If you're not for packaged food, for reasons of taste, nutrition, or budget, a lot of staple foods, like pasta and sauce, make big batches in short amounts of time, which can then be parceled out into various containers and frozen until needed. A little convenience food sometimes saves a lot of sanity. (And sometimes makes for lunch tomorrow, too!)

That's what I learned about cooking when I was just getting out of college. I've also been told that I make a very good macaroni and cheese.

As one might guess, when it comes to cooking, there's one important thing to keep in mind about all meals: Some Assembly Required.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Harold Faltermeyer - Axel F

What happened to the topic before, according to official LJ Idol chronology? Well, it was a traveling travesty all by itself, and didn't need much for elaborating on. Besides, I've already talked about things like the Tea Party Express before.

And thus, we move on to the next topic, by giving spring and summer a miss and moving straight into fall.

The United States does not directly elect its President. This will become important this year, as there are candidates vying for the highest office in the land.

Did we mention that the salary of the President of the United States is $200,000 USD / year? For comparison, Johnny Depp, of Pirates of the Carribean, Alice in Wonderland, and other Hollywood movies, is estimated to have made $100 million USD in 2010. That's approximately 500 times the amount of money the President makes. For a large part of the country, that would be a step up in salary. However, to get that $200,000 USD, each of these candidates will spend several millions USD, plus will have several hundreds of millions of USD spent on their behalf by organizations that are theoretically dedicated to "issues" campaigning, bankrolled by rich individuals and corporate coffers...all without anyone having to admit that they've spent that kind of money.

Okay, so what everyone thinks of as Election Day in the United States is not actually a direct election of the President.

At this point, by the way, we've gone through caucuses (where people gather in specific places to talk about whom they want to nominate for their party's platform), primaries (formal votes to decide who gets the nomination for the party platform in their state), and the grist of finding scandals, endorsements, mudslinging, negative campaigning, and an endless parade of advertisements.

So, yeah. The votes that are cast on Election Day are not a direct democracy, but could very well be considered a national opinion poll. A body called the Electoral College casts their votes for President and Vice-President. At best, the votes of the people are tied, by law or by contract, to determine from which party the electors sent to the Electoral College will come.

The electors themselves are usually tied by contract to vote for the party they represent, but there's always the possibility that the electors will choose not to vote with the popular opinion and elect someone else. Generally speaking, the only situation that would happen in is if there were someone who had giant popular appeal, promising impossible things to a vulnerable populace, and that would have obvious negative consequences to the country.

Which has a lot of people saying, "Well, excepting for that highly-improbable scenario, why don't we just do away with the Electoral College and just directly elect the President?" That would be the intuitive way to do things...

...except that even in a first-past-the-post system with a very winner-take-all flavor to it, like the U.S. system is, the Electoral College actally allows for subtlety. (Admittedly, it's a very Jaegermonster-type subtlety, but subtle nonetheless) Not all states are winner-take-all from their elections or electoral colleges. Some of them prefer to deal out their electors according to the percentage of the vote received in their opinion polling, which makes some states important to campaign in, even if one might not win the state.

And that's the big stuff. At your own election site, of course, it could be a church, despite it being a secular election.

It's a wonderfully convoluted process for something that should be fairly straightforward, and thus, we think that it fits nicely in the definitions of "counterintuitive."

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: John Williams - Hedwig's Theme

Before getting to the Shadow Idol entry, I thought I'd mention another anonymous love meme appears - go comment on your favorite DWers and make them feel wonderful. If you want to know who has already been put up, there's an index list. And now, your Shadow Idol entry...

"Bupkis".

bup-kis, from Yiddish: Used as a noun, it tends to mean nothing, zip, zero, the lack. That can mean the lack of things ("We got bupkis."), but it can also mean the lack of less tangible items ("He knows bupkis about that."), and actually tends toward a pejorative when used in that way.

Since it's a topic about nothing, that means there are almost infinite directions to take it in. Just in the United States alone, there's the bupkis that is the basic score of how the political parties interact with each other (bupkis getting through that might have an impact), the bupkis that is how much is done in terms of criminal charges against the people who wrecked the economy and the people that legalized torture, the bupkis that is the relief to ordinary people who are suffering the consequences of that economy-wrecking, the bupkis that is what's being done to respect the rights of people who are assembling peacefully to request a redress of these grievances.

We could drill down more locally and talk about the states that have their budgets out of whack, the states that passed laws evicting unions from the public sector (and then the repeal of some of those laws and the lawmakers that made them), the continued dismal funding of education and libraries, the problems of pensions and how everyone is being thrown to the wolves, and the declining ability of states to provide temporary relief for the unemployed and the poor. We could go hyperlocal about schools inundated with religious messaging with the full consent and participation of the teachers inside, the epidemic of bullying in the schools and the general apathy outside to fixing it, the issues associated with being out about something that society wants you to stay closeted about, or even the towns where the democratic process has been usurped and the townspeople are literally left with bupkis for elected officials or say in how their town is run.

I could talk about my personal life, the struggles of making sure there's enough money to meet the bills, the problems associated with mismatches of management styles with employees, the trends going on in my workplace that are disturbing and that I can't really stop, the need for upper management to think for a moment before barreling ahead with this, that, or the other thing, the stress of being put in the disciplinary process for things that shouldn't warrant it (and knowing the management is unlikely to budge on those issues because they're stubborn and insist on Making A Point, and that they think a 50% chance of not being fired is something to be happy about), and a lot of other things that are intensely personal - bupkis in the grand scheme of the universe, but relevant to the poor soul down here.

But truthfully, even though I could opine and suggest solutions and rail and rant and rave, when it comes down to being actually able to implement the changes, I have neither the means, the power, nor the influence to actually do so. Thus, I am reduced to being an NPC in my own story, tossed about by forces greater than myself, and having to perhaps settle for the idea that I might be able to affect some small local change, but that Big Things are likely going to be beyond me for this life.

What does that leave me with?

Bupkis.

Current Mood: listless
Current Music: Nobuo Uematsu - Freya's Theme

My palate is fairly dead. I know this because I have eaten food that has been finely and delicately spiced with many things, and I can't taste any of them. Salt, yes, pepper, yes, and things like garlic and onions, yes, but the rest? Not likely. So I don't build a lot of food memories, really, at least, not based on when I came across the most sublime chocolate truffle and savored it for minutes on end. No, my food memories tend to be the time that I found I actualyl liked coleslaw, thanks to a $5 per diem and a fish and chips vendor who clearly had it going for them in terms of coleslaw. The fish, as I remember, was forgettable, but the coleslaw was excellent - and it was the closest to $5 that any of the food merchants had that might have been a filling meal. So it's not really a food memory, per se, because the memory is more "Huh. I found something that fit the budget. And apparently, I like good coleslaw now, which I never would have known had I not been trying to spend as little as possible."

Similarly, talking about waffles on Sunday morning at the house isn't really about the waffles - there were plenty of them, and they kept coming until everyone had had their fill (or we ran out of the big batch of batter), but it's not really about the waffles - it's about reading the Sunday paper, especially the comics section, after having rolled out of bed at a late (for me) hour, compared to the very early rise-and-shine that happened during the week for schooling (or for work - sad as it is, the wake-up times for both were about the same time), and looking forward to a day of doing very little, oft-ruined by my father's insistence that some of his knowledge about tools and such be passed on to his son. Knowledge that has been useful, despite my myriad attempts to not learn it at the time.

Bridge mix while playing Pinochle, Turtles and Girl Guide Cookies during Boggle, the ever-impressive spread of baked goods (and liquors) available on 24 December, green room snacks while waiting in between musical acts (as the audience went through the various courses of dinner), which leads to its own memory of trying very hard not to break out laughing while the wig of a male actor was torn off during an unscripted moment in "Sisters", much to the appreciative laughter and applause of the audience...

...anyway, the memories are never about the food. I suspect that's true for most people, actually - the food is what was on the table, but the memory is what happened at dinner, or how the food was really just a prop to use for the playtime that was the real main course, or this, or that. The actual memories, the part that hurts or brings a smile to one's face, those are the things we want when we go back to the food. Or try to stay away from it, thinking it will make us popular and pretty again.

We eat to recall the memories, and we eat to try and bury them.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Mitsuda, Valente - Black Omen

"Inconceivable."

There's something interesting about that word. Most people keep using it...and maybe some of them actually do know what it means. To someone several years ago, the concept of the Internet would have been something that people did with magic, rather than technology. Robots, though, they might have been able to figure out - steel golems, although they are missing the animating word.

And at times, I can mention the Past That Never Was, usually derisively. A lot of people mention it when they want to complain about how degenerate the modern society is, as if it were inconceivable that a society that was so upstanding, moral (and devoutly Christian) to have become this Roman (Greek?) parade of vices, idleness, and a lack of patriotism. Yet, if one goes back in time, one finds a few things - one, the graffiti is the same (right down to the penis comparisons and boasts of sexual contests), and two, the philosophers of the day were complaining about how degenerate the youth of the nation had become and how they were not living up to the Past That Never Was (or, perhaps, the Platonic Form That Never Can Be). "Inconcievable" goes back, well, a very long way.

I think, though, there are some things that the past would find inconcievable in us moderns. Mostly, they're to a particlar degree, though. The past, even twenty years ago, could easily conceive of partisan fighting, and feel like the opposition was deliberately doing all they could to get in the way of the Right Party (whether on the right or the left). I doubt they would have conceived of it as something powerful enough to gridlock the government into utter inaction. I don't think they would conceive of the abuse of the filibuster rule to force the majority into a supermajority. They'd have an inkling of an idea about the influence of the religious right in politics, but to them, the wife-beating apologist James Dobson, super-televngelist Pat Robertson, and the megachurches that routinely advocate "issues" to their congregations are not yet a regular fixture of their lives.

The Tea Party has not yet made their ascent, nor has Occupy Wall Street. I'm not sure either of those are inconceivable to the past...although they might find it inconceivable that we have once again managed to let the banks run away and crash the economy after the S & L scandal they just went through.

The future will look back at us and say "Hey, those people, they couldn't conceive of this. They couldn't conceive of the idea of gender as a spectrum, rather than a binary. They were stuck on portable devices, instead of implants. They thought surgery could just alter their form of humanity, and dying their hair was a radical statement."

But you know, we have people who can concieve of it, and then people that will build it, and then it will become normal. Whether our future is 1984 or Transmetropolitan.

Then again, there are some things that are inconceivable that shouldn't be. Like the idea that a peaceful protest can exist somewhere in the United States without droves of police being sent in with military-style gear and tactics to clear them out. Despite the constitutional protection that guarantees the "right to assemble, and to request a redress of grievances".

That we let the banks ruin the economy again with gambling practices, despite the S&L scandal.

That we continue to deny basic rights to people, even after black people rose up to get their basic rights, after the Hispanic farm workers rose up to get their rights, the Stonewall Inn incident, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and many others.

That our elections process has been hijacked by moneyed interests who carefully select candidates loyal to them and then tell us to vote for one.

That multinational corporations report billions in profits to their shareholders and claim legalized penury to the government to avoid paying any taxes, the government does not audit the living daylights out of them every quarter they do so, and that the legislature seems quite content to look the other way on this.

And that we let other corporations buy legislators to pervert the idea of trademarks, patents, and copyright so as to remain a money-making vehicle, rather than a vehicle to promote the useful arts and sciences.

That should be inconceivable. But instead, it's reality.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Gustav Holst - Jupiter

A wonderful writer has the necessary self-image to show the methods by which she has constructed excellent deconstructions.

Politicians court votes and popular opinion, keeping one eye on re-election as they make decisions that can affect millions. Corporate CEOs, Wall Street traders, and Capitalists of all sorts attempt to take as much money as they can without having to give any back, trying to predict the future and use it to make money.

People believe this is wrong and individually join their voices in the belief that they can change the system and make it fairer.

Religious officials of several belief system tout that they have all the answers to life's questions and problems contained in their book, in their interpretation of the book, or in their heads. (Librarians, educators, and researchers actually have them, but the necessary research time is an exponential function of the complexity of the question.)

The founding of the nation I reside in rests on persons saying they could build a better life in lands unknown to them than in staying in the society they were raised in.

Advertisements blare from billboards, media outlets, shopping places, and the people that I talk to. The obsession with proper branding and the label of the product trumps the actual functionality and utility of the product. Persons famous for things other than what they are barkers for rake in obscene amounts of money by lending their endorsement to this product or that.

Authors, screenwriters, and dramatists flatter us by presenting us with ways to vicariously live lives far more exciting that ours, in strange worlds or new dimensions. They generate emotional responses from us to their creations, they give us dreams of a world that may never come to pass in our lifetimes, and they inspire us to take action to change our world and ourselves.

An entire complex of media and product tell us that we are inadequate by ourselves, and that our goal in life should be to look like the impossibly beautiful, makeup'd and digitally enhanced persons staring back at us from the TV machine or the glossy covers of magazines.

An entire population of people are secure enough in their bodies and images that they push back against this as hard as they can, and generate beauty outside of that message.

To make music or art, to tell stories, to orate, or to toast, one or more people must be confident enough in their skills to play in front of an audience, even if just an audience of themselves.

Millions of us have blogs and social media accounts, and we have the confidence in ourselves to broadcast these thoughts of ours to others, to find others whose thoughts we like, dislike, agree, and disagree, and to have discussions with them on all of the subjects above.

We have the self-confidence to show the outer world who we are inside, to not be ashamed of our kinks and fetishes, our preferences, our orientations, our dysphorias, our headspaces, and to campaign for acceptance by the world around us, but not to be defined by it.

So, what does narcissism have to do with me? In as many ways possible, narcissism has everything to do with me. In greater and lesser degrees, it powers the very things that you and I use, follow, enjoy, and produce. In excess or deficiency, it becomes a hindrance, but with enough self-confidence and self-image, all things are potential.

In writing this, I am engaging in an act of narcissism, because at the root, I believe what I have to say is important enough that I want you to read it. Even if up in the conscious brain, society tells me that such things are Unacceptable and that I must deflect any praise received, lest I believe that I am important.

"But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free."
--Prospero, The Tempest, Epilogue.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Gustav Holst - Second Suite in F

I see the 99% every day. I know some of them by name. How are you today, Mr. Jones? Mrs. Gonzalez?

Others I know by habit - you're the one that spends three hours on our job search computers, looking for anything that a person who's skills are now twenty years out of date, you're the one who just graduated and is desperately trying to find someone willing to hire someone out of high school. You come to get out of the house and meet others with little ones, because day care is too expensive. You're here because the shelters turn out everyone at dawn and we're one of the few places you can go and stay the day and nobody will kick you out or threaten to have you arrested for loitering. You? We're one of the few places that tries to work with your illness and just wants to make sure that the peace isn't disturbed too much if you have an attack while you're here.

You come in because you can't afford your broadband access and if it weren't for your cell phone you would have no way of anyone to reach you. You come in because you can't afford to buy anything that you would like to read, much less burn money on things that might be complete crap. You're here because there's nowhere to go after school but here because you can't go home - the door's locked, both parents work, and you don't have a key.

I see all of you, and I feel empathy for your struggles, as we deal with our own. As the values of your houses shrink, our operating budget shrinks with it. As you deal with layoffs and unemployment insurance, we lament the loss of staff because our millage rate is already at its maximum, the budget must be balanced, and the biggest expense is people and their benefits. Our usage statistics skyrocket as more and more people join the ranks of the unemployed, whether short-term or long-term. Perversely, our revenues drop when we need them the most.

There are bright spots, of course - the child whose face lights up when they receive their library card, knowing that it means they can take out anything in the collection that they want, the kid who calls me his buddy to other adults because I told him he can check out as many books as he can carry and more, the teenager who finds one of our resources on the shelf and reads it bit by bit, never checking it out, but gaining from it all the same. The countless research projects I've been able to make a perfect resource appear in a rabbit-from-a-hat fashion, the magic of stories and songs passing on the importance of oral culture, even if all the words are printed now, and all the rest. Those bright spots are nourishing and help keep sanity when there are three separate meltdowns and two tantrums all happening in different places at the same time.

I see the 99% every day. I look at the elections and their results and I wonder whether we're going to be able to pass some extra revenue generation the next time we're projected to, because the polling here says that People Hate Taxes more than they realize what those taxes pay for. They only see it as an additional burden on their already stretched budgets. They can be both right and wrong about the issue at the same time.

And you know why they Hate Taxes? Strictly speaking, most of the 99% don't hate taxes. They hate that the tax code is unfair to them. Some conservative columnists throw around that "more than 50% of the people in the United States don't pay any taxes." That's misleading at best. They may pay no net income taxes, but they pay taxes, both on income and consumption. Sales taxes, FICA, Medicare, and the rest are still taken out of their entire paychecks, instead of a small percentage of their paychecks (After all, FICA tax stops at a little over $110,000 of gross dollar earnings) The 1% don't want to pay taxes, even though they're the people who can do so without their lives being unduly affected. They would much prefer to charge taxes and profit from the costs of being poor. Your bank, for example, will probably run debits first before any credits to your account. If you happen to get overdrawn in those debits, then your bank will charge you a tax each time they can. The credit card comopanies are more than happy to tax you any way they find they can, whether for the privilege of having the card, or for any of the gracious pittances of rewards programs they offer, and all of these taxes are on top of the legalized usury they perform. (And then there are the payday lenders, whose legalized usury and poor taxation is even more.)

How much in net taxes do some of the most profitable companies pay? Zero or less. Yes, they do pay things like employer contributions to FICA and the like, but as their profits grow, the percentage of taxes they pay gets less...or they get it all back, like the columnists are saying is such a bad thing if the 99% do it. Those billions and billions are offset through the tax code. That offends the sensibilities of people interested in fairness. So when they Hate Taxes, it's because they know they'll be paying those taxes, and the corporations won't be.

In a functioning representative democracy, the elected representatives would be working to ensure that this is not the case. But there's one other thing that the 1% has working in their favor: Time. With having lots of money, one also has time. Many of the 1% work one job or less. Many of the 99% are working two or more, when they can get work. That doesn't give them any time to assert themselves and organize. Instead, they get inculcated with the message of the 1%. Because the 1% has the television stations, and the newspapers, and the cable companies that pick and choose what message goes out and how things are spun. And the money to fund campaigns that use all of those media to get messages out, so by extension, they also own the politicians that run. And most of the politicians are part of the 1%, anyway - they'll spend millions of their own money to get the power of government.

So they'll wait out the siege, and send the police after the demonstrators for anything they can.

The whole situation still stinks, despite it having been in place for as long as some of us have been here on Terra.

Which is why we talk about it in this week's prompt - "coprolite". Fossilized dung. That happens to have relevance to modern life.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Koji Kondo - World 1-1

"Three Little Words"

Three little words. With three little words, one can do all sorts of things in stories. It's one too few for the classic opening ("Once Upon A Time") and one more than the end to some a very famous bet ("You Lose"), but you can still do quite a few things with it. Three words are enough to start some of the greatest stories:

"In the beginning..."
"Once, there was..."
"In this corner..."

Or they do well in revealing important things about plot or characters:

"Snape Kills Dumbledore."
"It's his sled."
"...one more question..."

Catchphrases tend to be three words long:

"Eat my shorts."
"Make My Day."
"Life is good."
"Two thumbs down."

And some people spend their lives searching for a very specific set of three words:

"I love you."
"Je t'aime."
"Marry me, please."

So in three words, there's a lot that can be expressed. In three words, the plot hinges, the characters come to a realization foreshadowed six chapters earlier, Chekov's gun fires, and every trope in the world can collapse into the Trope Singularity... or it all falls apart. You see, in three words, it's also possible for the whole thing to go entirely to hell.

"Don't come back."
"It's over, [name]."
"Game over, man."
"Sic Semper Tyrannus."

All in those three little words. Were this actual Idol, I'd probably go for the cheese-type ending and say...

"Vote for me."

(This has been an entry for Shadow Idol. Feel free to leave commentary on whether or not this entry would be anything other than scraping the bottom of the barrel. If it would scrape the bottom, well, that's worth mentioning too, hopefully with suggestions to make it better.)

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Murray Gold - Amy's Starless Life

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Shadow Idol: The only black kid, or: People are not a monolith
Shadow Idol: On things not being where you are sure they are +7 comments
Shadow Idol - If I don't laugh, I'll commit homicide.
A Shadow Idol Twofer : The Chronicles of S / Toss 'em back. +2 comments
Shadow Idol: @ +3 comments
Shadow Idol: On the question of doing things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. +1 comment
Two things of importance - leaving an abusive situation and finding camaraderie +1 comment
Shadow Idol - Trying to make two topics relate to each other... +2 comments
Shadow Idol: On the problem of the mob not wanting to get involved. +5 comments
Shadow Idol, Prompt 15: On the problem of focusing attention on all the wrong things.
Shadow Idol, Prompt 14: Happy Red Day.
Shadow Idol 13: On things that are relevant to our lives today. +2 comments
Anecdotes of cooking and learning to cook in your own apartment. +4 comments
Shadow Idol, Prompt 9: The convoluted path, not the direct one +2 comments
Shadow Idol, Prompt 7: What Seinfeld was supposedly a show about. +2 comments
Shadow Idol, Prompt Six: The memory of food... or food evoking memories.
Shadow Idol, Prompt 5: That which cannot be conceived of.
Shadow Idol, prompt four: A flower that bends toward water.
Shadow Idol, Prompt 3 +3 comments
Shadow Idol, Prompt 2: Three Little Words +4 comments

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Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

A waystation of News and Opinion

Entries tagged with shadow idol

Shadow Idol: The only black kid, or: People are not a monolith

Shadow Idol: On things not being where you are sure they are

Shadow Idol - If I don't laugh, I'll commit homicide.

A Shadow Idol Twofer : The Chronicles of S / Toss 'em back.

Shadow Idol: @

Shadow Idol: On the question of doing things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Two things of importance - leaving an abusive situation and finding camaraderie

Shadow Idol - Trying to make two topics relate to each other...

Shadow Idol: On the problem of the mob not wanting to get involved.

Shadow Idol, Prompt 15: On the problem of focusing attention on all the wrong things.

Shadow Idol, Prompt 14: Happy Red Day.

Shadow Idol 13: On things that are relevant to our lives today.

Anecdotes of cooking and learning to cook in your own apartment.

Shadow Idol, Prompt 9: The convoluted path, not the direct one

Shadow Idol, Prompt 7: What Seinfeld was supposedly a show about.

Shadow Idol, Prompt Six: The memory of food... or food evoking memories.

Shadow Idol, Prompt 5: That which cannot be conceived of.

Shadow Idol, prompt four: A flower that bends toward water.

Shadow Idol, Prompt 3

Shadow Idol, Prompt 2: Three Little Words