(Re-dated so I can more easily find the damn thing; started 3 Dec. 2009.)

Broken down by various categories; to be updated as necessary and as I remember.

( lists, and if you don't want anything resembling spoilers, not even 'this book is bleak, this one is not,' then don't click the damn cut tag )

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/21510.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

So I've now got accounts on most of the major "social media" whatevers.

I'm sure you're all shocked - SHOCKED - that some of them I use for very little actual "social" interaction.

Like Pinterest, which is great for categorizing images so that you can quickly scroll through a collection and find that one hilarious one of the bird standing on the other bird which I know I grabbed a long time ago but can't easily find. For example. I don't use Pinterest for anything approaching "social" reasons. It's a source of eye candy, and a useful tool.

Anyway, I was thinking about this the other day, and figured I would write it all down, because that's what this journal is for! Twitter-worthy banality, but expanded to fill the space! Aw yeah.

- Twitter: for keeping up with the current state of various things.

Also useful for communicating w/various Occupy Boston people. I like Twitter a lot.

- Pinterest: for storing images. Mostly birds.

Also for finding additional eye candy. I really really want an export/backup feature, like, now please.

- Tumblr: for . . . what the fuck is Tumblr.

I don't know. Tumblr is weird. No, really. I use it sort of like Pinterest, for all the random crap that amuses me that doesn't quite warrant a pretty arrangement on Pinterest. But there's no easy way to really communicate with other users. Tumblr is /weird/. By following one or two people who posted some stuff I liked, I have ended up seing things there that I just. *blinks* Yeah. (You want insight into fannish behavior in pictorial format? Get thee to Tumblr.)

. . . I spend a lot of time there.

- Facebook: for posting things about how awful Facebook is, how Google will steal your soul and make you like it, and how fucked up computer/internet security is.

Also for picking fights with former high school friends; causing my mom to wonder if I have died due to lack of posting; cementing my hatred of people and their general vapidity, much of which I blame on FB's asinine forcing of status updates to be too small to be meaningful. I don't use FB much at all, and I loathe it. I have sporadic moments of great reconnection with people there, but I hate the system so much - it's so ugly, too - that I don't want to use it for real, ongoing communication. It is easier for me to have a useful conversation with people over Twitter.

- DW/LJ: for substantive updates, lengthy writing, etc.

Real communication/connection with people I care about. Awwwwww.

- Diaspora: for . . . um.

Still figuring this out. I haven't had many people to communicate with, so it's mostly been stagnant, but finally - FINALLY - some of the Occupy Boston folks are signing up, so it may end up being a mix of activisty/political ranting that doesn't fit on Twitter, plus Real Life Updates I don't want to post on Twitter because hello? That is All. Public.

---

Hello, I seem to have bored myself to the point of pain. I'm sorry.

Originally posted here, where I'd prefer comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/535226.html. There are currently . I don't want anyone to be forced to view comments in LJ's anti-user friendly new style.

Occasionally some errand or meeting causes me to spend time in or going through parts of South Boston.

And I am always struck by two things:

1) How much it doesn't feel like Boston. At all. Like, I feel really disoriented, and only the sight of familiar high-rises reassures me the T didn't dump me out 2000 miles away in another city. It looks like parts of Denver.

2) How much I like it. Disorientation aside, it feels right. Comfortable. The scale is right. And even with some massive surface roads, and that traffic, it seems so much more peaceful than the rest of the city.

Last night, I was almost overwhelmed with a desire to just sit down and not move for a while and just relax in the presence of - of not being penned in by the same gawdawful clapboard or brick mundane mediocrity all jammed together like architectural sardines with no room left to stretch or breathe.

Originally posted here, where I'd prefer comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/533275.html. There are currently . I don't want anyone to be forced to view comments in LJ's anti-user friendly new style.

Commodification: the essence of our time

The dominant process underlying the transformation of life in all societies, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, is the conversion of things and activities into commodities, or commodification. . .

Competition forces employers to maximise profits or go under.

From Hammer to Nail: What We Lose When We Lose Video Stores. Some parallels to losing book stores to places like Amazon (Netflix being the Amazon of movies), but with some key distinctions:

ARP: A movie like that, the way to watch it is on tape. Why do you think that is not important to people? Do they just not notice or have we been conditioned through advances in technology to think it is better?

JM: As if clarity in picture is the foremost thing we should look for in filmmaking, this extreme reality. People don’t want reality. When people go to see movies with special effects, they certainly aren’t seeing reality. There’s something about the look of VHS that adds something. Like vinyl people love to hear the crackle of the needle. There’s something about hearing the hum of the VCR and the somewhat blurred look of a horror movie or a film noir that really adds a depth. We have a really not good version of "Detour," the Edgar Ulmer noir, and that movie looks like the movie makes you feel. The warped quality with blurred edges.

ARP: DVD was sort of the start of that. Throw away your tapes. Here is a widescreen, crisp image. And that just keeps going. I reject so thoroughly the idea that anything needs to look better than DVD. I understand how Blu-ray or what theaters are projecting now is different, but I don’t understand why that matters to people. So 1080p feels smart to people in a way that they don’t even understand.

JM: The studio jargon just clings to people, and they go out and want that.

ARP: . . . With streaming or Netflix, they’ll never be told to pick one thing.

JM: It’ll be, ‘Let’s watch it for five minutes, and move on to the next thing, and the next thing.

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/532776.html. Despite having set my LJ journal to display comments in my own style, I am now forced to view all comments everywhere in the new style, and it is literally giving me a headache.

Look at this Baby Bird.

No, go look.

. . .

OH MY GOD IS THAT NOT THE BEST TUMBLR EVER?!?!?!?!?!?

No offense to the people I know who post cool stuff on Tumblr, but BABY BIRDS!!!!

The SO threatened to turn off the house network so I'd stop making terrible squeaking sounds (not to mention the near loss of breath from laughing at this baby tawny frogmouth because it looks like an angry fluffball, or perhaps Fizzgig - more frogmouth youngsters EEEEEEEE asdfkjh!).

One of the things I really like about it is that the blogger has a pretty diverse bunch of pictures - sure, there are ducklings and baby chickens, and LOTS of baby parrots, but there are also plenty of more unusual birds. Like pelicans, which, whoa, look particularly WEIRD when very young and completely featherless. And check out the shoebill storks. I was surprised at how tiny the chick is! They're large enough birds that I'd expect a larger egg.

I've had several bird-focused tumblrs bookmarked for a few years, because flipping through them was always a good mood-lifter. This one puts all the rest of them to shame.

I may have swamped my "Birds" board on Pinterest with baby birds last night and I FEEL NO SHAME.

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/532156.html. Despite having set my LJ journal to display comments in my own style, I am now forced to view all comments everywhere in the new style, and it is literally giving me a headache.

If you're not already familiar with naamah_darling's work, you may wish to check this out (it is a list of her work & where to find it).

You may also wish to read that link if you want to learn of yet another way Paypal is fucking people over, and not in fun ways.

I have read none of her porn/erotica myself, though I've been reading her on LJ/DW for years, and her ranting (and non-ranting writing) there is excellent.

(Please note that the 'assholes' tag is referring to Paypal, because apparently I don't have any better tags for this kind of entry.)

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/531298.html. Despite having set my LJ journal to display comments in my own style, I am now forced to view all comments everywhere in the new style, and it is literally giving me a headache.

Hello, test subjects.

If you go to a website, and the organization has navigation for things like "Events" and "Wiki," and when you click those links, you wind up on a page that has completely different navigation and appearance from the main site, what is your reaction?

For example, check out NYC Resistor. All of their main navigation is grouped together, it has the same appearance, etc., but Events and Wiki take you to sites with a different look and navigation structure. Events goes to Eventbrite, and Wiki takes you to their wiki.

Do you expect that if Events takes you to an Eventbrite page, instead of a list or calendar within the organization's home page, it should open up in a new tab, or the same one you started in?

Do you find it confusing if it opens in the same tab? Or difficult to get back to the page you started from?

Do you think that a link that takes you to a page with a different appearance and nav structure should be separated on the main page in some way, either with an icon that suggests "This link is different from these others," or by being physically segregated from the rest of the navigation, or by having a different color or background?

Ditto all of the above for wiki pages: should it open in a new tab? Should it be colored differently or put in another grouping of navigation, separated from navigation within the main site?

Also, once you are on an organization's wiki, what sort of navigation back to the other site do you expect or want? Is a link in the sidebar that says "Main website" or something enough? Are you confused without seeing the same navigation (options, colors, etc.) that was on the main site?

Thank you. You will find your reward at the end of the maze.

(Why am I asking? I am part of the group that is working on redesigning the Asylum's web site, and the group is evenly split on how navigation that goes "outside" of the main site should look, whether it should be grouped with other primary navigation, whether it should open in a new tab "so people aren't confused," etc. Half the group says "treat it like other primary nav" and the other half says "No, it is different, it must look and act different." I have seen no sites that DO treat those links differently, but if you have examples, let me know.)

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/531019.html. Despite having set my LJ journal to display comments in my own style, I am now forced to view all comments everywhere in the new style, and it is literally giving me a headache.

. . . What brought people out there was anger. But what made them stay put, what empowered them to break away from the convention of leaving once the ritualistic demonstration of their discontent had been showcased, was a different matter altogether: in the gigantic assemblies, in the endless discussions lasting late into the night, a new realisation started to sink in. A realisation that this struggle was much bigger than any single demand or any mere attempt to slightly re-figure the plexus of power. Against an all-out capitalist assault, any meaningful response could only be as complete, as all-encompassing as as the assault itself. If there was to be any meaningful change, there would be no more separation of struggles - every single struggle is my own.

From the essay "A funny thing happened on the way to the square," from Occupy Everything. This specific essay is about the protests in Greece; most of the essays were written before OWS got going.

Most of them are focused on the root problem underlying all of this: capitalism, as it is currently being practised, which, the more closely I look at it, the more I want to recoil from in horror and have nothing to do with.

I can't say that much of what the essays cover is really new to me - it's been obvious for a long time that the focus on money as the most important thing, on profit as the greatest good, is a completely fucked up way to conduct civilization - but seeing numerous other people address different aspects of it, all put together in one handy book, hit pretty hard.

And it's not like there's a lot of serious criticism or even examination of capitalism anywhere but "fringe" media.

It's good reading, although the essay "Do the entrepreneuriat dream of electric sheep?" which critiques corporate culture, nearly caused me to commit serious violence to the document. Not because the essay was bad, but because of the way it described that horror show.

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/530442.html. Despite having set my LJ journal to display comments in my own style, I am now forced to view all comments everywhere in the new style, and it is literally giving me a headache.

There's a non-dairy spread based on coconut.

It does not taste like butter (I've had nondairy spreads that do).

It does not fail to melt like some butter substitutes do.

IT IS THE MOST FUCKING AWESOME THING ON TOAST EVER.

(If you are inclined to put, say, raspberry jam on top of it, rather than dunk it in a savory soup, though DAMN the coconut is still tasty even if it doesn't quite go with Portugese fish stew.)

(I am still looking for a more neutral or butter-tasting butter substitute.)

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/530186.html. Despite having set my LJ journal to display comments in my own style, I am now forced to view all comments everywhere in the new style, and it is literally giving me a headache.

1. I have dyed a (small) portion of my hair green, and I am inordinately excited about it.

2. I have almost all of the bottle of dye left.

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/529564.html. Despite having set my LJ journal to display comments in my own style, I am now forced to view all comments everywhere in the new style, and it is literally giving me a headache.

Right, so, sometime not too long ago, maybe back in October, maybe earlier this fall or even summer, I read a post on DW or LJ about how knowing martial arts isn't enough to protect yourself (in the context of "why did you just fight back to prevent being raped") and I -think- this post - or one mentioned by a commenter - referenced another write-up on another blog discussing this same issue. One or the other (the 2nd one, I think) made some very strong points about how usually, you don't train to seriously disable a random attacker and also, most people are not trained to seriously defend themselves in a way that would be necessary - that is, to strike your attacker in a way that might actually kill them.

I didn't bookmark either post (sigh) nor can I remember poster names, blogs, etc. I've been skimming lots of past entries on DW and LJ and haven't found the right reference.

I am sure I found one or both directly from someone on LJ or DW, though.

Is this ringing any bells? Help!

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/528670.html. Despite having set my LJ journal to display comments in my own style, I am now forced to view all comments everywhere in the new style, and it is literally giving me a headache.

Earlier today, I could still view comments on LJ in my own journal's style. And add subject lines. And preview the posts. And not wind up feeling like I'd been blinded by SUPER BRIGHT LIGHTS.

This is no longer the case.

Therefore, I will be reading as much as possible only on DW, to save myself the literal pain of the new, "improved" system.

Dreamwidth, by the way, is letting new users sign up this month without requiring an invite code.

ETA: And for no reason I can discern, things are functioning properly again. This may explain why, except when I checked the setting mentioned there, my settings are the way they should be, and were that way earlier today, too - and when I read that comment, things were behaving properly again. I have no idea WTF happened.

Originally posted here, where you may leave comments: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/528141.html.

UBC study explores distrust of atheists by believers

The researchers conducted a series of six studies with 350 American adults and nearly 420 university students in Canada, posing a number of hypothetical questions and scenarios to the groups. In one study, participants found a description of an untrustworthy person to be more representative of atheists than of Christians, Muslims, gay men, feminists or Jewish people. Only rapists were distrusted to a comparable degree.

The researchers concluded that religious believer's distrust – rather than dislike or disgust – was the central motivator of prejudice against atheists, adding that these studies offer important clues on how to combat this prejudice.

. . .

The religious behaviors of others may provide believers with important social cues, the researchers say. “Outward displays of belief in God may be viewed as a proxy for trustworthiness, particularly by religious believers who think that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them,” says Norenzayan. “While atheists may see their disbelief as a private matter on a metaphysical issue, believers may consider atheists’ absence of belief as a public threat to cooperation and honesty.”

Because life is SO MUCH BETTER when you have someone around to bully people into compliance.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/526580.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

One of the drawbacks to using a new machine is remembering just what settings I need to have. *sigh* I guess I didn't need all that stuff I lost in the last crash and can't even remember what it was.

Dreadfully uncheery information about the economic situation in Europe. (I wonder if this means the Euro as currency may vanish, and all those lira I have from uh, way too long ago at this point, will be valid again in the near future?)

Related, Why Iceland should be in the news but is not, about that country refusing to do what the banks wanted.

The belief that citizens had to pay for the mistakes of a financial monopoly, that an entire nation must be taxed to pay off private debts was shattered, transforming the relationship between citizens and their political institutions and eventually driving Iceland’s leaders to the side of their constituents. The Head of State, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, refused to ratify the law that would have made Iceland’s citizens responsible for its bankers’ debts, and accepted calls for a referendum.

Of course the international community only increased the pressure on Iceland. Great Britain and Holland threatened dire reprisals that would isolate the country. As Icelanders went to vote, foreign bankers threatened to block any aid from the IMF. The British government threatened to freeze Icelander savings and checking accounts. As Grimsson said: “We were told that if we refused the international community’s conditions, we would become the Cuba of the North. But if we had accepted, we would have become the Haiti of the North.”

I expect every other country facing similar challenges will simply bow to pressure from the banks and things will get much, much worse.

But the recession is over! Our GDP is back up!

Citigroup released some documents on "plutonomy" that it now wishes to disappear. Sadly for Citigroup, those documents are on the net. Too bad, jerks.

There's a lot of good writing on occupywriters.org. If you haven't read Lemony Snicket's contribution, do. It's one of my favorite pieces of writing on OWS, ever. Here are 3 other pieces I have open in tabs:

* Greg Mitchell writes about Upton Sinclair, and some similarities with Occupy.
* Laurel Snyder makes some observations about childhood.
* Judith Arcana writes a poem about communication.

Another personal account that makes some of the same points I've seen repeated over and over, and goes on to make a point that many people talk around, but few people name outright:

Let me be clear: The lack of a formalized message is NOT a problem. As I hinted at above, the encampments are liberated spaces that foster discussion about the problems we face together–and there are hundreds of problems in this country that we’re identifying. We’re having conversations about money in politics, corporate personhood, bailouts, the fractional banking system, student loans, immigration, the death penalty, the hijacking of Christianity, foreclosures, racism, GM foods, censorship, civil liberties, wars, budget cuts, police brutality, and hundreds of other topics. We think some are causes and others are symptoms. We’ve only been having these conversations since September 17. There are A LOT of problems, and a lot of proposed solutions. It’s taken us a while, and it’ll still take us a lot longer.

But I think anyone who’s payed any attention to us knows what we’re here for–and to say otherwise is disingenuous: We are here because there is a serious inequality problem in this country. For some reason, people seem to have the need to require that #Occupy, as a whole, issue a set of demands. Isn’t it enough that we’ve developed functional tent cities as space to foster our discussion–spaces that are a vision of the society that we want to see exist?

. . . If you truly need a message, truly need one word that will define everything that I stand for (and only what I stand for, because I cannot speak for #Occupy), truly need for the backlash that is the product of decades of budget cuts, greed, deregulation, and human suffering to be condenseed into one easy-to-digest word, I offer this one: empathy.

From a blog worth reading often, quotes from a longer piece by David Graeber, an anthropologist and anarchist:

A constant staple of 1950s American situation comedies, for example, was jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes (always of course told by men) always represented women’s logic as fundamentally alien and incomprehensible. One never had the impression the women in question had any trouble understanding men. The reasons are obvious: women had no choice but to understand men; this was the heyday of a certain image of the patriarchal family, and women with no access to their own income or resources had little choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on. Patriarchal families of this sort are, as generations of feminists have emphasized, most certainly forms of structural violence; their norms are indeed sanctioned by threat of physical harm in endless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. . . Women are always expected to imagine what things look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to reciprocate.

Oh, 1950s, you never left us after all! You just got a little more subtle.

You may have seen people pointing to a wretched piece of speculation posing as fact written by Naomi Wolf, about how DHS has been told by the President and Congress (as if those two could work together on anything right now) to attack OWS. Here's one response explaining why Wolf's article, in particular, is a problem. She's treating the police response as if it is new:

. . . Wolf’s framing of #ows as exceptional erases the way that all aspects of government, including DHS (and ICE for example) are coordinated already, in the interest of repressing the majority who have so little power. This includes immigrants, pacifists, people of arab descent, other people of color, environmental activists, you name it. It’s not new. As many have pointed out, it’s entirely believable that various state and local entities would have phone calls, and coordinate, in order to respond to people resisting state authority.

Here's another response discussing known facts vs. Wolf's statements and speculations.

As aggravating as I have found it to see (sheltered, white) people reacting to police mistreatment and brutality towards protestors with the horror of someone seeing something awful for the first time, I am glad that the militarization of the police in the US, and their relationships with communities of color wrt brutality, is getting more attention now. Thanks to the War on (Some) Drugs, and the protests in Seattle, Miami, and NYC (Republican National Convention), ZOMG TERRORISM, it should have surprised no one that the incidences of pepper spraying, unprovoked beatings, etc., happened.

I have been a bit surprised that Denver and Portland have seen the full-on riot gear and use of mounted police; I always thought those were kind of relaxed cities. (Apparently Denver got meaner following the DNC in 2008 . . . which makes me glad I wasn't living there at the time. Seeing the Free Speech pen in Boston earlier in the decade was emotionally scarring enough.) What happened in Oakland (the first big 'riot' with the tear gas) is about what I expected to happen, only earlier and more often.

There are a couple of other societal concerns that are getting more attention, too: homelessness and public space.

Cities needs to make homeless people invisible has lead directly to rules banning camping and sleeping in public places overnight - which has, of course, lead directly to cities evicting or raiding Occupy camps, which have been providing food, minor medical care, community, and other services to homeless people (the camps have also had problems with some homeless people), some of whom are active members of their groups. I've met a lot of people in Boston who are either currently homeless, or have been in the past, and have experience living on the streets in Boston, in the winter.

Sadly, one of the open tabs I lost in a recent crash was an article about public space, and how it would actually be more accurate to refer to the vast majority of it as "publicly accessible space," but not "public space." (I do have several other articles bookmarked talking about privately owned public spaces - like the particularly unusual situation of Zuccoti Park - and related issues. A number of architecture and related sites have been covering this.)

One of the things I find most distressing about living in cities is this notion of parks that close at dusk. Maybe the parks back home closed, too, and I was just unaware of the fact. But they sure didn't have fucking chain link or other fencing all around them, with a few entrances, and signs telling you when you were allowed to use the public space.

This "closed after dark" leads to complete bullshit like this from NYC, where if you don't have your ID with you while unknowingly trespassing, you can wind up in jail for 36 hours, or however long it takes the system to process you.

Here's a great article, which draws some parallels between OWS and NYC post-9/11.

As I wandered in the Zuccotti Park area last week, I was struck again by how much what really happened on the morning of September 11th has been willfully misremembered. It can be found nowhere in the plaques and monuments. Firemen more than deserve their commemorations, but mostly they acted in vain, on bad orders from above, and with fatally flawed communications equipment. The fact is: the people in the towers and the neighborhood — think of them as civil society coming together in crisis — largely rescued themselves, . . .

Ordinary people shone that morning. They were not terrorized; they were galvanized into action, and they were heroic. And it didn’t stop with that morning either. That day, that week they began to talk about what the events of 9/11 actually meant for them, and they acted to put their world back together, practically and philosophically. All of which terrified the Bush administration, which soon launched not only its “global war on terror” and its invasion of Afghanistan, but a campaign against civil society. It was aimed at convincing each of us that we should stay home, go shopping, fear everything except the government, and spy on each other.

The only monument civil society ever gets is itself, and the satisfaction of continuing to do the work that matters, the work that has no bosses and no paychecks, the work of connecting, caring, understanding, exploring, and transforming. So much about Occupy Wall Street resonates with what came in that brief moment a decade before and then was shut down for years.

That little park that became “occupied” territory brought to mind the way New York’s Union Square became a great public forum in the weeks after 9/11, where everyone could gather to mourn, connect, discuss, debate, bear witness, share food, donate or raise money, write on banners, and simply live in public. (Until the city shut that beautiful forum down in the name of sanitation — that sacred cow which by now must be mating with the Wall Street Bull somewhere in the vicinity of Zuccotti Park.)

I really have to wonder why city governments think it is a better use of their resources to send heavily armored police out to harass, raid, evict, and beat peaceful protestors instead of spending money to provide sanitation services. Why they feel they must take an adversarial approach instead of a cooperative approach. Why the police (in some cities, anyway) ignore people in camps who come to them pointing out violence and drug use, asking the police to deal with those crimes.

Surely the people in city governments understand homelessness is a problem. Unemployment is a problem. Having to reduce government employees' benefits is a problem. Lack of funding for public transportation and other city services - problems.

[I guess it's that whole "I am in charge, I must enforce the rules, you must obey me, you are disobeying therefore you must be punished, working things out is not possible at all, prepare to be punished" hierarchical bullshit.

Speaking of anarchism, the more I read about it the more I realize that most mature people are operating under principles of anarchy - the main difference is that most people believe we need a formal state like the one we've got. Of course, anyone who rides the T - or drives in Boston - is probably never going to believe that you can trust most people to behave with "reasonable understandings with each other, or to treat each other with dignity and respect." Not that I regularly arrive to work hating humanity or anything.]

For all that some people criticize OWS (like many other leftist/liberal/whatever protests and movements) for having "too many" "special interests," it seems to me that almost ALL of "special interests" are asking for the same fundamental thing.

The real "special interest" groups are the tiny percentage of people in positions of power who insist that they cannot possibly budge a millimeter, they cannot give up anything.

It is this that causes some of my unease whenever I hear people talking about politics as being "all about relationships with people." On the one hand, yes, that is absolutely true, but it's a major, major problem, because there's no good counterbalance to improperly influential relationships.

If I worked in the [banking, defense, oil, whatever] industry with you, and now I'm in Congress - hey, we're old pals, I'll be more sympathetic to your concerns than the idiots who elected me. They're not paying for my election campaign - or not much of it, anyway - and besides, I need to keep on good terms with my old business because I won't be in politics forever. (Yes, sometimes some laws get passed, or almost get passed, to try and limit this revolving door bullshit. OH MY GOD the SCREAMING and the TANTRUMS and the refusal to pass the laws from the people this affects! You'd think they were in this job for themselves, not to serve the people who elected them.)

The more I learn, the more obvious it is that the system isn't broken, it's working out just as it has been designed, redesigned, refined, and corrupted to do.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/526031.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

This deserves a longer, more thoughtful and introspective post, but for now, I will leave you with this required reading instead; the comments are also worth skimming if for nothing other than to see that I am not alone in that sentiment.

If people who said "thank you for your service" had instead said that in a more thoughtful way, perhaps I wouldn't cringe every time I tell someone new that I've been in the military, but what the fuck am I even supposed to say to such a kneejerk response?

"You're welcome?"

No. You are not welcome, actually.

I didn't do anything worthy of being thanked. I made powerpoint presentations. A lot of them. I spent a year - A YEAR - in training alone. I spent another year theoretically doing a job I had no damn idea how to do, and I don't know how I ever got any good remarks on my yearly evaluation for that position. I was never remotely in harm's way, and the only goddamn reason I even signed up is because I was pressured to accept an ROTC scholarship, and I figured well, at least I'd have a job of some kind when I finished college (with a degree in a subject that I am not well suited for, as it turns out). It wasn't out of a sense of duty or love of country or any of that wholesome crap, and after a year+ of service I really had strong moral objections to the whole business (file under "too young and stupid to have done my research in advance").

FURTHER, while the oath we take is a really pretty awesome one, you have got to be fucking kidding me if you think that killing people and breaking their toys (as we referred to our mission) is in any way shape or form actually supporting or defending the Constitution of the United States.

If you want to acknowledge the fact that some percentage of veterans have consented to being put in harm's way, out of love of country or sense of duty, or have actually been wounded in service, fine, but please for the love of . . . whatever . . . do it in a more thoughtful way than a robotic "thank you for your service" because you feel you ought to say that to all of us.

Dammit I have no good tag for this.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/524901.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Why are they 'so expensive?'

It's a good reality check, both for people who don't try to earn money from handmade goods and those who do.

If you don't make things, or you've never actually stopped to think about all the work that goes into making things, or read about it, or heard about it from someone who has, you need to read that.

If you do make things, it's also good reading, because it's confirmation that your pricing is probably not only NOT 'too expensive," but probably underpriced.

Stolen from this post, which also has some links offering guidance for how to price your items, and a handy flowchart asking "Should I work for free?"

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/524443.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

I am still amused by rickrolling, and variations of it (like pointing someone at a list of Things Rick Astley Will Never Do).

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/523900.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Read: http://rosefox.livejournal.com/1719075.html
and: http://siderea.livejournal.com/890278.html

for more, but the basic idea is that there's a bug that allows users to access other users' accounts, see locked posts, EDIT OTHER USERS' POSTS, etc.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/523450.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Farmland floods do not raise levels of potentially harmful flame retardants in milk.

So instead, I will point you to Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance, which is amusing and rather sharp.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/523123.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Via various Twitter accounts:

Occupy Denver has been ousted from the park they were camping in.

Meanwhile, police are at Occupy Boston filming everything. Like, right now.

And the Mayor of New York, two days after saying Occupy Wall Street can stay (source), now says they have to move out temporarily, so the park can be cleaned, after which OWS can move back in . . . but they can't bring sleeping bags, tents, tarps, or pretty much anything else, nor can they sleep anywhere in the park. They have to be out by 7 am tomorrow for "cleaning." The new 'rules' for Occupy Wall Street, because the protesters making plans to clean the park up themselves just aren't good enough.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/522533.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Mayor "will not tolerate civil disobedience in the city of Boston." http://www.necn.com/10/11/11/Mayor-Menino-on-Occupy-Boston-arrests/landing.html?blockID=575486&feedID=4206

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/10/03/333925/top-5-reasons-why-the-occupy-wall-street-protests-embody-values-of-the-real-boston-tea-party/

1.) The Original Boston Tea Party Was A Civil Disobedience Action Against A Private Corporation. In 1773, agitators blocked the importation of tea by East India Trading Company ships across the country. In Boston harbor, a band of protesters led by Samuel Adams boarded the corporation’s ships and dumped the tea into the harbor. No East India Trading Company employees were harmed, but the destruction of the company’s tea is estimated to be worth up to $2 million in today’s money. The Occupy Wall Street protests have targeted big banks like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, as well as multinational corporations like GE with sit-ins and peaceful rallies.

2.) The Original Boston Tea Party Feared That Corporate Greed Would Destroy America. As Professor Benjamin Carp has argued, colonists perceived the East India Trading Company as a “fearsome monopolistic company that was going to rob them blind and pave the way maybe for their enslavement.” . . .

3.) The Original Boston Tea Party Believed Government Necessary To Protect Against Corporate Excess. Smithsonian historian Barbara Smith has noted that Samuel Adams believed that oppression could occur when governments are too weak. As Adams explained in a Boston newspaper, government should exist “to protect the people and promote their prosperity.” . . .

4.) The Original Boston Tea Party Was Sparked By A Corporate Tax Cut For A British Corporation. . . .

5.) The Original Boston Tea Party Wanted A Stronger Democracy. There is a common misconception that the Boston Tea Party was simply a revolt against taxation. The truth is much more nuanced, . . . The issue at hand was representation and government accountable to the needs of the American people. . . “As Americans learned more about the provisions of the new East India Company laws, they realized that Parliament would sooner lend a hand to the Company than the colonies,” . . .

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/522121.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

I really really want to make a post to the b0st0n LJ, which has been VERY QUIET for weeks and weeks, asking, oh so innocently, what are those people doing in tents down by South Station?

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/521462.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

At least on YouTube Vimeo or something.

http://jhameia.tumblr.com/post/11011716408/dear-advertisers

Formatting makes it hard to read, but /so/ worth it.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/521206.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

We were driving through a quiet residential neighborhood and came to an intersection with a 4-way stop.

As we approached our stop, two other cars approached from two other directions.

Everyone stopped.

And then-

Everyone went through in the order proclaimed by the traffic rules to be the correct order.

No one held back and waved at another vehicle to insist No no, after /you/.

Really!

It was one of the most beautiful things I saw out there, and no one I was with had any idea how marvelous an event we had just participated in.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/520666.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Google, long known for its left-leaning political persuasion, is suddenly dumping money into right-wing organizations like The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute . . .

Facebook, which only recently entered the Washington influence game, filed paperwork this week to create “FB PAC” and hired Katie Harbath, a former digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, as associate manager of policy in the company’s new Washington office. Other GOP operatives have joined Facebook’s Washington operation.

Source, via twistedchick.

You know, I really liked not paying any attention to any news whatsoever while I was in Oregon.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/520174.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

First, two different wikis listing alternatives to Google, ways to use Google and the net more privately, and other information related to the nymwars and switching from Googleware:

https://googlealternatives.wiki.zoho.com/HomePage.html
http://nyms.wikispaces.com

This seems to have been pretty big news, but I'll post it anyway: one of Google's top people has said that G+ is meant to be an "identity service," not a social networking service.

This might not be so bad except for their terrible mismanagement of names, and their apparent belief that being identified with something NOT on your ID is not a valid way to identify people, and that the Google Profile that G+ depends on is also necessary for you to use Reader, Buzz, and Picasa. So if they suspend your profile, because the name you use looks funny, or because some asshole reported you, it's not just G+ that's affected.

More on identity on the net and some things about the government (US) being involved.

If you use Android, leaving Gmail can mess your life up if you've used a Google account linked to that Gmail to get apps onto an Android phone.

Diaspora is getting really close to opening for beta users. If you want an invitation to the main pod, I can send you one.

Friendika is another federated (as opposed to centralized - FB and G+ and Dreamwidth and etc are all centralized) social networking thing, similar to Diaspora (and the two services recently started linking up so users on one can communicate with users on another). I have less experience with it, though on the pod I signed up on, the options provided in the gender drop-down made me stare and stare and say What the fucking fuck? and stare some more and ultimately not select anything. So points for lots of options and for not making it mandatory, but minus points for leaving off things like "high femme" and "genderqueer" and instead offering things like "mostly female" and "hermaphrodite." (I am under the impression that this may be determined by whoever runs that particular server rather than hardcoded into all instances of Friendika.) I think Diaspora's "gender is an optional text box" is the best way to handle that aspect of a person's profile.

One interesting thing that Friendika offers that I haven't seen elsewhere, yet, is the ability for each user to create many different profiles, and set different access levels for each profile.

I've run into several other social networking projects that all claim to be Better Than Facebook, but not all of them are open for users yet, so who knows!

I have conflicted feelings about how much of Google's motives match up, more or less, with some of my suspicions about what they are really up to. On the one hand, yay, I'm not a crazy conspiracy theorist; on the other, boo, they are /just as goddamn creepy/ as I suspected.

I would like to thank the authors of all the dystopian/authoritarian SF I read at an impressionable age for giving me the background for thinking about/coping (coping, ha) with this.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/517722.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Yeah, so, there was an earthquake in Virginia. And some of us in Boston felt it.

Because the primary admin in our office is out this week, I was working in the office today, instead of from home.

Our office is on the 3rd floor.

At first I thought I was just having some sort of dizzy spell (it happens. I get vertigo sometimes, too, but almost never when I am sitting down), but then I realized the building was swaying - blinds were swinging gently - and other people were wandering out of offices and cubicles looking confused and amused.

Making jokes about how maybe no one should stand too close to the glass walls separating the offices from the cube farm area.

No one leaving.

Or apparently understanding what was going on.

. . .

Bostonians are fucking doomed if we ever have a serious quake here.

This was the first earthquake I've ever felt (there was apparently a mild one in/near my home town when I was a kid, but I didn't feel a thing).

And I did. not. like. it. at. all. The sooner I am done at work and have my feet securely on the ground, the better.

I still feel like I am swaying.

There's a part of me that wants to run away and find some nice open field to lie down on. And not set foot into any upper floors again. EVER.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/517537.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Today was the 2nd day of two weeks of non-violent protests at the White House regarding the Keystone XL project, and, as planned, the 2nd day of people at the protests being arrested.

The first group of people arrested were being held for a couple of days, supposedly as "deterrence" to protesters coming along later. And also in complete contradiction to what the police had said would probably happen:

</blockquote>In multiple phone calls and in person meetings before today’s sit-in, the Park Police had previously assured organizers that participants in the protest would be facing a “post and forfeit” situation, meaning they would pay a $100 fine and be released the same day. While participants in this morning’s sit-in were trained the evening before to prepare for the worst, many were operating on the “post and forfeit” assumption due to police assurances.</blockquote>

But that's not why The Onion is outmatched here.

. . . U.S. Park Police told organizers of the sit-in that the jail time was expressly intended as a deterrent for future participants.

The Park Police were especially concerned that sit-ins would continue during the week of events beginning on August 28 surrounding the dedication of a new memorial to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., one of the greatest exponents of creative nonviolence.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/517223.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

I've wanted to have a good comprehensive resource like that for a while, but nowhere out there does it exist.

I found alternativestogoogle.org, but it has very little info and some of it is out of date: one of the Docs alternatives it lists was - you'll love this! - acquired by Google and subsequently shut down. Well we wouldn't want any competition now, would we! (They do, at least, link to several other places using the original open-source code.)

I've compiled some lists myself, and bookmarked blog posts by other people who are finding alternatives, but a single place where people could go to find such information seems like a good thing!

Is anyone else interested in helping with this? Or have contacts with people using G+ who might want to contribute or make use of the info? (I've seen several people make complete 180's from "happy major Google user" to "I am unplugging from Google in all ways possible.")

Ideally, it would have a reasonable way to search for a type of service, a list of providers, and some sort of rating or reviews, though this could be done with comments appended in the style of a blog post.

I emailed the person I believe to be the owner of alternativestogoogle.org but haven't heard anything back :\

I also dropped a note to gevil.org - which has not been updated in years.

I'm toying with the idea of setting up a wiki on zoho.com, but I'm not sure that's the best format for organizing the information.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/516989.html. Pick your poison and comment there.

Here is a pretty graphic of Google's revenue. Note the 2nd and 3rd largest slices (you may have to click to enlarge so you can read the relevant search terms on #2).

Here is an article about how Google's business model contributes to economic inequality.

Note how much money companies are willing to pay to be able to get access to user info so that they can market to you:

To get some sense of the value of user information, look at the recent controversy over another big Internet player, namely Apple, when it demanded that sellers of subscriptions to apps on the iPhone had to give Apple not just 30% of sales, but sole control of user information as well. Lauren Idvik at Mashable noted that publishers like the Financial Times may not have liked the 30% cut Apple wanted from subscriptions, but "the main problem is that Apple will not share subscriber data with publishers, long one of publishers' most valuable assets, particularly to advertisers." Think about it--your personal data is worth potentially more than 30% of the cost of what you are purchasing and most users give it away for free to companies like Google and Apple.

Lesson: information = money. And not only are companies buying your information to better sell you things, they are using that information to sell it in discriminatory ways.

From the article: ". . . the fact that users are de facto involved in barter with Google, trading privacy for individual tools, should tell you this is an exploitive situation. Like most barter economies, pricing is opaque and creates massive opportunities for economic arbitrage by the sophisticated side of the barter transaction--i.e. Google."

To tie this back to the first link, note how Google did Just Fine, Thanks, during the subprime mortgage fiasco.

I have no reason to think that any other company that gives you "free" email or other internet services is any more ethically-minded than Google.

Moving on, here is some good news/bad news on the nymwars front. The good news is that apparently, the powers that be do intend, eventually, someday, to make it possible to use pseudonyms. The bad news is that, as the current state of G+ suggests, the powers that be do not give a flying fuck about how discriminatory the current name policy is.

If they cared, the system would have been built differently from the start.

---

The Human Cost of the tarsands/pipeline projects. Not directly related to the toxicity of coming into contact with spilled oil and other chemicals. I learned some new words; I knew the concepts, but I did not know there were words for them.

Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/516784.html. Pick your poison and comment there.