( All under here )

This index was last updated 27 AUG 2011

Okay, first things first - this is the first movie I've actually watched in the cinema in over two years. I don't go to the cinema much, mainly because I'm not fond of crowds, and also because I don't like having my eardrums hammered six inches into my skull by the volume the movie is inevitably played at. However, my partner had, by this time, seen the Avengers movie twice, and I'd seen enough rave reviews of the trailers on various US sites (we got it here in Australia about a week or two before the folks in the US... I suspect we were being used as a test case) to suspect it was going to be a movie I'd enjoy. I wasn't wrong there.

(Oh, and can I just offer a brief thumbs-up to the Rockingham United cinema complex - very nice little place, although the seats were a bit snug around the hips. It was a bit quiet on Sunday morning when we went there, but that was all to the good, as far as I was concerned).

( Possible Spoilers Ho! )

Overall

Okay, I come to the Avengers movie with a lot of comics background from the late 1980s and early 1990s. I recognise a lot of the characters, and a lot of the canon. I've loved Marvel's stuff for years, and I really do prefer their take on the world over DC's take. I also have a lot of respect for Joss Wheedon as a director, a screenwriter, and a fan of things geeky - he knows how seriously the fans take things, and he respects that - and what's even better, he's shown that respecting the fans and how seriously they take things can be a real money-spinner for Hollywood, so he's not as subject to Executive Meddling as some other directors. So there was a lot of Good Stuff coming into the movie from the beginning. That said, what came out at the end more than deserves all the rave reviews and thumbs up this film is getting everywhere.

I'd give it at least four out of five; on a percentage scale, it's rating up around the ninety-two percent mark. Not absolutely 100% brilliant, but certainly close.

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I was busy reading through a lovely little article on the ABC this morning about a group of doctors who have submitted a statement to the Senate enquiry into marriage equality here in Australia. The position of this group of doctors (about 150 in all, one of whom is a member of the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission) is that "marriage between a man and a woman is the "basis for a healthy society"."

Their contention is that ""It's well proven that children who grow up with a mother and a father in a biological mother-and-father family do better than children who don't have the opportunity to grow up in that kind of family,"

Now, my immediate thought when faced with this was along the following lines:

Show me the research - This is always my response to ninety percent of these sorts of statements in news articles. I want to see the studies these people are pulling their quotes from, and actually figure out whether their justification is accurate.

( teal deer underneath )

Really, if you get past the first page of their submission, it's just the same sort of small-minded, socially-conservative idiocy that you'd expect from the Christian (Always) Right - "Don't Do It Because We Don't Like It; Our God Says This Is EEEEVUL!!!"[4]. It's a bit disappointing that 150 doctors hold these views, but then again, so long as they don't let their views get in the way of their practice, I've no problems with that. They're entitled to hold opinions as private citizens. It's when they try to use their position as doctors to force those opinions on the rest of the population that I have problems.


( Footnotes below )

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I'm busy re-reading some back issues of Tiger Beatdown at the moment (great blog, love it to bits), and I'm currently going through the stuff from about late August last year - back not long after Sady posted her critique of either "Song of Ice and Fire" or "Game of Thrones" (whichever one is by George R R Martin, anyway) and started getting inundated by the nerdrage. And one of the things I'm realising is that while I may be am a geek (I geek statistics, for fuck's sake; there's not much more out there which is geekier), I don't really identify myself as a member of a particular geek community.

There's a reason for this. The majority of the most vocal geeky "communities" out there tend to be represented in public by people who are possibly their least likeable members. The ones who are blatantly and openly sexist, for example. The ones who are ardent Mansplainers. The ones who take out their rage at the Mean Girls and Jock Guys from high school on the internet at large. The ones who perpetrate the worst acts, and then try to excuse it on grounds of being geeky, being fans, being nerds, having been bullied at high school, or basically anything other than "I'm finally on ground where I feel unassailable, so I'm going to make everyone else's life hell".

Basically, a lot of the problems I have with identifying as a geek, or identifying as a member of any particular geeky or nerdy community (including fandom, in a lot of ways) is that I get a strong feeling that I'm immediately supposed to become entirely passionate about the subject in question. For example, I consider myself a fan of Dr Who - I've been in love with Doctors One through Seven for years now (since I first started seeing episodes of Dr Who at around age five or six - so about 1976 - 1977), and even found a few good things to say about the telemovie which introduced the Eighth Doctor. But recent Dr Who fandom, I find, is entirely too damn polarised. One has to be 110% passionate about the subject, one has to be completely and utterly engaged with it, one cannot criticise things AT ALL (when at least part of what I loved about the Old School fandom was their willingness to engage with the wobbly sets, point out the plot holes, make fun of the scenery chewing, and the regular double-entendre of "we must act now!"). Instead, in order to prove one's membership of fandom, one has to be completely passionately devoted and delirious about the subject to the point where I'm certain the actors and writers must find at least some of this just a little scary. That's not the fandom I want to be identified with.

I'm a fan. But that doesn't mean I'm blind to the faults of what I'm seeing. For example, I have a lot of problems with a lot of what Stephen Moffat (the current show runner for DW) writes, and have done since I was first watching "Coupling" on DVD. Yes, he's capable of writing good dialogue; yes, he has a nice touch for comedy; yes, he can handle drama very nicely too. But he also has a rather nasty streak of often unremarked-upon sexism in his writing.

I have problems with the current formula timewise, because it tends to lend itself more to the one-shot sequences - one of the things I liked about the old format was the way that a plotline was strung out over multiple weeks. I dislike the high-tech effects, too, because quite frankly one of the things I loved about BBC science fiction back in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the way that the BBC's effects team worked to suggest so much with so little. Watch "The Ark In Space" - there's a moment in there where an actor manages to pull off a very convincing performance as someone who is undergoing an horrific transformation into a totally alien creature, and all he uses to do it is a green-tinted bubblewrap glove. These days it's all CGI or high budget effects, and we lose that wonderful combination of good scriptwriting and good acting skill which put the BBC stuff several cuts above what came out of the US studios in my book.

I don't like the constant "reunion" episodes at the end of each series - that was one of the things the old format had very right, I thought - the ability to convey that the Doctor went out of the lives of these people, and their lives went on without him. What isn't pointed out quite as obviously is that as far as the Doctor's life goes, he had to go on without them - and he'd lived over nine hundred years by the time Tom Baker's tenure was done (I'm not too sure how old the character is by the time Christopher Eccleston stepped into the role, but I'm sure by now he's hit his millennium). The Doctor has had to learn to be very good at leaving people behind, and learning to live with that. Bringing everyone back at the end of each season for a grand final reunion is just rubbing it in, to my mind.

Now, yes, I do have these problems with New Who. But that doesn't mean Old Who was completely faultless either. As I said before, there were the wobbly sets, the zip-up-the-back rubber-suit aliens, the chewing of the scenery, the stories with the Obvious Filler chase scenes, the Monster-of-the-Week format, the recurring monsters who weren't used to their full capacity. For example, the Daleks were sometimes used as rent-a-thugs - yes, in some of Terry Nation's scripts, back before he wrote "Genesis of the Daleks". Then again, Terry Nation actually meant for the Daleks to die off at the end of the first storyline they were introduced in, but they became fan favourites, so he was stuck writing them for about twenty years. There's actually a lovely story in the commentary or interviews on the DVD set of "Genesis of the Daleks" where the script editor points out that "Genesis" was the second storyline they'd requested from Terry for the Daleks - the first one was a rather predictable chase sequence, and it was knocked back as a result. So then he sat down and did a full retcon on the origins of the Daleks, and a new legend was born. But that was the other great thing about Old Who - while there were some absolute shockers, there were sometimes these unregarded gems in the middle of things. For example, the 5th Doctor story "Kinda", which actually turns out to be a very interesting piece of genuine science fiction storytelling (provided you're willing to ignore the giant snake effect at the end).

I count myself as a fan of the Final Fantasy series of games, too. But I'm aware they're not perfect. They're written from a Japanese perspective, which means that yes, there's a lot of embedded sexism in the way that gender roles are visualised, and yes, there are a lot of in-game tropes that I sometimes don't have the cultural background to understand. In the earlier ones, the graphics are clunky, and in the later ones the hero-figures are, quite frankly, irritating (Tidus and Vaan both inspire me with a strong desire to thump them over the head). The fixation on providing add-ins to the Final Fantasy VII continuity annoys the crap out of me (particularly the whole business of Crisis Core - Genesis wins my personal prize for "video game character I'd most like to slap"), as does the tendency to create sequelae to just about everything (whether or not there's actually a story hook to hang things onto). The outfits for the female characters in the later games tend to be somewhat stripperific (exhibit one: Fran the rabbit-woman and her "playboy bunny" armoured lingerie), and Tetsuya Nomura definitely majored in "impractical armour", since I think the last properly-armoured major character in the FF series was Cecil, in FFIV! Don't believe me? Check Dissidia. Bartz from FFV is wearing a tunic. Terra from FF6 wears a mini-dress and leggings. Cloud (FF7) is in cargo pants and a knitted top, with one paudron. Squall (FF8) wears leather pants, a t-shirt and a leather jacket (at least he wouldn't get too seriously flayed in a motorcycle crash). Zidane (FF9) is wearing boots, a poofy shirt, and trousers (all apparently fabric). Tidus (FFX) is at least wearing that glove-cum-arm-protector thing. But really... there's at least two (if not three) of these people who live in cultures where a battlefield generally means there are bullets flying around. Is it too much to expect they're going to have at least a little bit of protection from high-velocity lead poisoning?

(And yes, this is my geeky side coming out again - I'm a practicality geek, I'm a plothole geek, and I qualify for life membership of the Overthinkers Club. I am the type of person who will spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the worlds of Blake's 7 and Firefly co-exist, who will write a long and involved post about the political and economic situation of Minas Tirith post-Ringwar, and who will spend much time and effort trying to figure out what the fsck is going on with the world of Final Fantasy VII to create the Shinra Electric Power Company).

I find things interesting because they make me think. Even if what they're making me think is along the lines of "how the fsck does that work again?" I'm not set up correctly for unthinking adoration and devotion of my source material. I'm more set up for mild-to-moderate irritation at various qualities of it, and a willingness to make snarky comments about it. I get pissed off when the only fan-space I'm allowed to inhabit is one which requires total and utter worship of the creators and everything they do - I think that fan-space not only insults me as a fan, it also insults the creators of the original work, because it sets them up as beings incapable of handling critique, incapable of handling dissent, incapable of handling any different viewpoint to their own. I write myself, and what I find I appreciate most as a writer is not the person who writes a simple "loved it, plz rite moar!", but rather the person who asks questions, the person who offers bits they liked and why they liked them, the person who engages in dialogue about what I've written (I so rarely hear from these people - I've started being a bit more open with being one myself in the hope of encouraging more of them!), and the person who isn't ashamed or afraid to tell me "this sucks, and this is why!". I'd like to believe that the creators of some of my favourite fan properties have a similar attitude toward criticism.

My point is, being a geek, or a nerd, or a fan, should not mean that we switch our minds off and become uncritical worshippers. In fact, I believe very strongly that as a fan (of a series, a genre, or a writer), I'm in a better position to offer criticism, because it's coming from a position of overall love.

I'll be honest, though - I'm more than just a fan, more than just a geek. So I'm always going to be a little on the outer with these communities, always feeling I don't quite fit in, because I just cannot maintain the posture of unquestioning adoration which appears to be required. I can do enthusiasm. I can do critique. But I think I'm a bit too old and cynical for adoration these days.

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Oh internet, great font of knowledge, aid me in my search for enlightenment on this subject: I wish to be able to organise and back up my bookmarks in Firefox, and also use them as a map to interesting little corners of the 'net (where "interesting" is defined as "deemed interesting by me, rather than by a social network").

Trigger: Losing 6 - 8 years worth of bookmarks in one hit due to a computer meltdown on Wednesday night. I'm busy re-creating them as I go, but I want to be able to organise them too.

What I'm using at present: At the moment, I'm using the all-in-one sidebar in Firefox, which tends to sit open to my bookmarks (a feature of Internet Explorer's that I liked and adopted). I have some bookmarks sitting loose, but the majority of them are in folders. The folders at present are all loose in the top level of the bookmarks hierarchy, but I know me, and I know eventually they will be nested. Probably anything up to six layers deep in some cases. (Finding individual bookmarks started getting slightly trying at that point, but by then it was too late to do anything about it.)

I'm also starting to use the "tags" feature of Firefox bookmarks, because I think they'll wind up helpful as a searching aid. (I have the tag searching add-on downloaded and waiting on a restart to get going).

What I Want:

* I'd like to be able to limit certain tags to a certain folder, rather than having all the tags in the wider cloud. For example, I have a folder called "Fanfiction" - I'd like to be able to have tags for specific authors, characters, fandoms and so on limited to that particular folder, rather than having to wade through them to tag something which isn't fanfiction related.
* I'd like to be able to back all of this up on a regular basis to my 1TB expansion drive, rather than having it on my computer's hard disk drive (since this is what killed my last lot of bookmarks). At present, my plans for this involve mumbling through Firefox's settings to find out where it stores this data, and manually making a copy once a month or thereabouts (ditto with my email archives - guess what else I lost in the crash), but I'd love to know whether there's something I could use to automate the process.

What I Don't Want:

* Offline backups accessed over the internet. Call me picky, but I really don't trust cloud computing at this stage - there's too many ways for my data to go walkabout.
* Having to keep at least one tab of my browser constantly reserved for bookmarks - I have the sidebar because I like being able to see them all, right there, when I want to go looking.
* Anything which tempts my tendency to fiddle with things to the detriment of actually doing anything useful (such as Pearltrees - seriously, I took one look at the description of that particular plugin, and knew it would eat not only one day but dozens of them).
* Anything which requires me to be constantly signing in somewhere else in order to access my bookmarks.
* Anything which requires a duplication of effort (i.e. I create the bookmark in Firefox, and then I have to create it again somewhere else). I want to click once to create a new bookmark (and ideally speaking, I'd love to have the option to tag things as part of the bookmarking process, rather than having to go back and alter the bookmark's properties to add them).

So, if anyone can help - either by letting me know whether this sort of thing already exists; letting me know I'm asking for the moon and a pony (or in other words, "not happening; can't happen!" stuff); offering possibilities for places to look for information, either as direct links or search terms; or failing all that, commiseration will be appreciated too.

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I want my "My recent Documents" menu back. It was right there on the start menu in WinXP, so I could be working on a document hidden about six layers deep in the directory structure, and go straight back to it. No need to create shortcuts on the desktop, no need to have multiple copies for ease of access - just click on a link in a menu, and back I went to the document I was working on yesterday (provided, of course, that I hadn't done something daft like clearing out the menus).

Windows 7 doesn't appear to have that. So in order to get back to the stuff I'm working on, I have to chase them through the directory system every single fscking time. Instead of just having the "My Documents" folder sitting open to the top level so I can look just about anywhere in my rather convoluted hierarchy of things and bits and pieces, I have to damn well be paging back and forward and round about in circles. It's irritating.

I want my "My Recent Documents" menu option back. Very much.

I'd also like to be able to have the icons on the desktop a little smaller, since they're currently bloody huge. 7 icons to the short side of the screen? Really, Microsoft? This is with things at their smallest resolution, too. Not fun. I don't WANT my desktop covered over with cutesy little pictures of shortcuts to every single damn thing. Seriously, each of those shortcuts is approximately 4 times the size of the XP version; on a screen with better technology than the previous laptop, and with a much better graphics card, why am I suddenly looking at the Large Print edition of Windows?

Actually, comes to that, with a better processor, a better graphics card, and a whole heap of newer hardware, why am I suddenly looking a drastically less screen real estate in the first flippin' place? I want to be able to read PDF files, thanks, without having to print the fsckers out at great expense. This means I don't want to have to be constantly scrolling back and forth and hither and yon in order to view the top and the bottom of each column. Seriously, things keep up at this rate, I'm going to be buying another monitor just so I can have it in portrait orientation to read documents on.

I want Windows XP back. Windows 7 sucks.

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So, last night, around 9pm, my computer decided to die on me. I have a 1500 word lab report due tomorrow. I have a 2000 word essay due Wednesday, and a 12 part online quiz that needs to be taken before then. So I'm sure you'll understand why I had a bit of a meltdown as a result. We're not sure precisely what died on the old 'puter - my guess is it's either the hard drive or the battery or the power systems. All I know is that when I try to boot the silly thing, it bleeps, switches itself off, switches itself back on again, the CD drive whirs, and then it fails to boot at all. Gave me an IRQL Less than or equal, but of course that vanished before I could actually note anything sensible off it too.

Anyway, Himself offered his spare laptop as a substitute. Problem is, his spare laptop hasn't actually had Windows activated on it yet - he's been sitting with it running non-stop for a couple of months without actually doing anything useful about this. Can we say "no help whatsoever" kiddies? I knew we could.I

Cue meltdown.

I begged a couple of minutes on Himself's PC in order to write up some very rapid emails to a couple of unit coordinators, basically explaining that ohshit, the PC had died, but I was pretty certain I still had all the data I needed, but ummm, I might not be able to get everything in on time, so sorry.

Then this morning, I did some fast research (again, via Himself's computer) and headed down to J&B HiFi down in Rockingham, where I picked up the new computer. J&B won out over Dick Smith because the J&B website actually has all the computers organised by PRICE - so I could see they had a good solid range of options available in my price point, as well as having a lot of possibilities to choose from.

Meet Orac, folks. He's a 15" Samsung laptop, with a nice schmick "no messy fingerprints" case and all the latest and greatest bits and pieces (plus go-faster stripes on the graphics card, if what the salesdude told me is correct - I just walked in there with a list of requirements, a budget, and a bad case of "gotta get this fixed NOW!"). I lucked out - J&B were having a sale, so I got him 15% cheaper. But the name is deliberate. Orac here is small and pretty, has heaps of power under the hood, and blinkenlights galore. He's also cranky, bossy, and determined to be in charge of everything.

I spent most of the day doing the standard install and reboot polka as I found drivers and software and you name it for all my various bits and pieces again, and then I spent the afternoon getting to work on the various assessment items I had to work on. But I couldn't do anything online, because for reasons only known to Orac and Himself, while Orac could see the household network, it couldn't see the internet. So that had to wait for Himself to get home (he knows where the pitfalls are with regard to the household network; I don't. So I don't touch it).

Anyway, now I'm in the process of recreating my previous Firefox setup, and recreating about six to eight years worth of flippin' bookmarks as well (because guess what *was* on the hard drive of the old PC?). If I owe you email, it'll have to wait until I get Thunderbird sorted out.

I love my life, really I do.

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There are times when I regret having picked up the psychology units. Now is one of them, mostly because last week's lectures and tutorial discussion for the "Intro to Psychology" unit were about what used to be called "abnormal psychology" - mental illness, the way it's diagnosed and treated and so on. So there was a lot of rather triggering stuff in there, and even though I'm pretty used to dealing with this sort of thing, it does rather back up the mental sewers, so to speak.

One of the key bits which stuck with me was the rendition of the behaviourist perspective on what depression was: a form of "learned helplessness", in reaction to a series of situations in which the person is receiving near constant stress and mental pain, and is unable to alter their circumstances in order to prevent or alter this. Now, this is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing, in that it basically points out that the depressive reaction is far from being stupid and insensible - in fact, this theory points out that under the circumstances, depression is the only damn thing possible. It stops being a sign of weakness, and instead becomes a wholly sensible and reasonable reaction to the situation - and just being able to see the depression in that light is a Good Thing. It's a not-so-good thing because it got me thinking about what the circumstances could have been in my lifespan to trigger things.

Then along came another article (this one being one I found via the HaT linkspam post) which pointed me at a possible set of triggering circumstances: twelve years of school bullying. Now, this may not seem like much, but it pretty much fits the method for the learned helplessness reaction pretty damn closely: take your subject, put them in uncomfortable circumstances, and make damn certain the subject is aware that no matter what action they take, the uncomfortable circumstances aren't going to go away. In my case, this was school - and it quickly became clear to me that no matter what action I took, the bullies weren't going to stop, and nobody was going to take my side in things - not the teachers, not my parents, not my peers, nobody. Also, there was no way known to mankind my parents were going to pull me out of school just because I was being bullied. So I learned the only thing I could do was endure.

Now, I'm not saying that school bullying was the sole and only factor in my becoming the depressed adult I am today. I grew up with two parents who were both depressed, and at least three out of my four grandparents had depressive patches in their lives, not to mention most of my relations. So there's a strong familial culture of depression, and not that many options for learning non-depressive patterns of thought and action. I suspect there's also a genetic factor, one which responded to a hormonal trigger, because I know that things got a lot worse very abruptly around the time my periods started. So it's likely I would have been prone to depression even if I'd been a popular kid in school, rather than the designated target. What I am saying is that twelve years of school bullying didn't really equip me with any alternative mental strategies for dealing with negative situations other than getting miserable and staying there.

So I'm currently wading through all this (and yeah, I'm weepy as I write this, catharsis is annoying). It comes complete with flashbacks to the worst moments (courtesy of memory pulling these things out to do their turn on the stage of the Grand Old Embarrassing Recollection) and lots of buried pain. Meanwhile, I'm also supposed to be writing an essay for the subject in question, and a lab report for a different psych subject, and the old brain is basically saying "fsck this shit" the whole damn way. All I'm wanting to do is drop my bundle and sleep for a day or so. It's 11.15am, I'm supposed to be diving out the door to go to uni in two minutes, and even after a cup of coffee my get up and go just hasn't got up at all. So I think I'm going to be skipping today's lecture and tutorial, because quite frankly, I'm just not feeling capable of dealing with anything.

Time to indulge the inner three-year-old and her fit of the "don't wannas". Maybe tomorrow I'll be all grown up about things. Right now, though, I think I need a blankie and a hot drink and lots of sulking time.

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I'm still alive and well and living in suburbia. Himself is employed again (starts the new job on Monday), so we have income (or at least, income greater than the dole) to look forward to. Mostly I've been wandering around making comments on other blogs.

I've taken to playing Echo Bazaar again - they're letting people create accounts even without Facebook or Twitter accounts to link to them. If you're on there, have a look for Hepzibah Murgatroyd - that's me. At present, I'm busy dealing with an invasion of rats in my lodgings, which is leaving me quite nicely set up for a few other storylines (for a start, I'm looking at having accumulated at least half the purchase price for a route to another part of Fallen London).

I've stopped reading certain online periodicals - mainly the ones from the "Gawker" stable (so Jezebel, Kotaku etc), and any others which insist I have to have Javascript turned on in order to be able to view content on their website. Yes, I'm a web purist - I have this insane notion that I should be able to see web content using an HTML viewer (such as a web browser) without needing to enable fifty gazillion different add-ons (or run through a list of approximately twenty different JS hosts in NoScript in order to figure out which ones are going to need to be enabled so I can see what's on the page). It's quite easy: they aren't going to show me something worthwhile in plain HTML, I'm going to take it as a declaration that they don't have any worthwhile content.

So far that seems to work just fine as a sorting algorithm.

Hmmm... other things, other things. I've been reading through this post by Nick Mamatas about Geek Pride and Geek Culture, wherein he points out that, among other things:

"Yes, a fascination with the strategies of Pokémon or Magic: the Gathering is just like someone else's fascination with RBI averages. That doesn't raise your interests up; that helps let us know how silly too minute an interest in professional sport is.

Which makes me think about my latest bit of statistics neepery. I've long realised I like playing with numbers and statistics. I enjoy compiling huge reference sheets of this, that and the other thing, and usually I'll do that with things from role-playing games (you should see the spreadsheet I have for the monsters in Eyangband!). It's something which keeps me happy, and gives the more neepish side of my personality something to do. This year, I've decided to go back to a tried-and-true old favourite source of statistics, namely the AFL football. It's fun, really. I "watch" the game via the ABC's Grandstand AFL Scores app, refreshing every so often and updating the spreadsheet and the text file I have with summary stuff as required. It's interesting coming up with a "story" for what I'm seeing (for example, my ongoing explanation for long periods where there's not been a scoring kick made by either side is that the umpires have confiscated the ball; if one side hasn't scored for a long period in the first quarter, maybe they're not sure where the ground is) and it's a lot more fun for me than watching a bunch of blokes run around a muddy paddock to the sound of other blokes telling me what's happening right in front of my eyes, with regular interruptions for commercials for beer.

(This round's match to watch is going to be the West Coast Eagles vs the GWS Giants. Top of the ladder vs bottom of the ladder, and the previous two matches the Giants have been in they've pretty much been walked over. However, they do have a few chances of winning. Possible strategies include: telling the Eagles that the game's been moved to a different ground, whoops, sorry, didn't you know?; locking the Eagles players out of their changing rooms; or locking the Eagles players into their changing rooms and "losing" the keys until about three-quarter time. I should explain for non-AFL fans that GWS are the newest kids on the block, they're from a non-traditional AFL state, and they're not really expected to do more this season than try their hardest and walk away with the wooden spoon anyway.)

Oh, and it all gives me numbers to play with. Which is also fun.

We have a rent inspection coming up (sigh) which means this weekend we're cleaning the place up so it looks nice and shiny for the nice person from the real estate company when they visit on Tuesday. At present, I'm tackling the kitchen and the main family areas, and my system is fairly simple - thirty minutes straight of work, followed by one hour of futzing around doing whatever else I fancy.

I find this works better for me than just ploughing in with a sustained cleaning frenzy does. For a start, it means I'm allowed to stop and rest for a time, and it's not "giving up" - and "giving up" is something which inevitably kills off my cleaning frenzies. Also, thirty minutes is a nice, comfortable time interval. It's long enough to get several tasks done (for example, I can dry up one load of dishes, wash a new load, and move on to clean up bench space or wipe down the stove or whatever) and see some progress. It's long enough that I can feel like I can take my time on things and do it Right (whereas fifteen minute bursts make me feel rushed - gotta do it all NOW!), and I can also feel like I've achieved something at the end of the thirty minutes. The one hour gaps in between the thirty minute bursts mean I don't feel put upon or martyred by having to do the jobs, and it also means I'm not storming into Himself's den to demand he does something too (so he can be as miserable about the whole mess as I am). Contrariwise, having the bursts of activity between the breaks for other stuff mean I'm not feeling guilty about not helping out with the cleaning. Plus, it means I have enough energy left at the end of the day to do things like cook dinner (an important consideration).

The fanfic is still going up at AO3, although I'm starting to run out of stuff to post to plump things out to the 10 items per week thing. Oh dear, I may have to either slow down posting, or start writing again. Oh noes.

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Urgent call to increase the dole

ACOSS is asking the government to increase the dole (unemployment benefit) by $50 a week and to index it to wages. As someone who's on the dole at present (along with her partner), I stand by this request 100%. Here's why:

My dole payment per fortnight: $498.
My partner's dole payment per fortnight: $493
Our rent per week: $340
Our food and groceries budget per week: $100
The amount of money left over each fortnight after we pay for rent and food: $111

Out of that $111, we have to pay the electricity bill, the gas bill, the water charges, put petrol in the car (one tank of fuel costs approximately $50), pay for public transport fares, cover the costs of our internet connection, pay for our mobile phones, buy any medication we need, cover the costs of job search, and pay for any other incidental expenses which crop up (clothing, shoes, replacing household goods, car registration, car maintenance etc). Needless to say we're not doing so well, and the accumulated costs of living are nibbling away at our scanty savings all the time. We're now in a situation where one big bill is capable of cleaning us out financially.

Neither of us smokes. Neither of us drinks on more than an occasional basis (say, 1 drink every 6 - 8 months). We don't have kids, we don't have pets. Our entire recreational output is based around the internet, and the existing games and DVDs we own, because we can't afford new ones. We can't afford to go out either, so we're pretty much housebound. We go out to do the grocery shopping - that's our big excursion every week.

We've been living like this since about mid-January, and we're looking forward to living like this for at least another 3 - 6 months, because neither of us is the "ideal" employee, and as such, it takes us time to find new work. Now, the treasurer is busy saying that the government's aim is to get people back into work. Well, that's great. It would be even better if there were employers willing to employ us.

In the meantime, an extra $100 a fortnight each would help immensely with our situation. It would reduce the stress, and the constant dread of finding that next bill in the mail.

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The Australian federal House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs has an online survey up regarding marriage equality. If you're Australian, and interested in the subject (and you haven't already put in a response), have a look.

A few points worth noting:

* The committee has apparently been looking over this matter since 16 February this year.
* The survey expires on 20 April this year.
* As at 15 March, the majority of the 27,000 or so responses they'd received were in the negative.
* The first I heard of this survey (as a person who's in favour of marriage equality, but not passionate about the subject) was about half an hour ago, via Hoyden About Town.

If I were inclined to conspiracy theories, I'd say someone (or several someones) wanted to keep this survey under the radar. Hence my signal boost.

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First up, some context. I'm studying a couple of psychology units this semester in uni. For my Introduction to Psychology unit, I'm currently reading up in our textbook about the naure of the way that visual perception is handled by the brain (we're covering brains, sense and perception this week, yays!). So I'm reading through a whole heap of stuff about visual processing in the visual cortex.

Then I come across the bit about the various groups of cells which make up feature detectors in the brain. Here's the exact text I'm reading:

"Simple cells are feature detectors that respond most vigorously to lines of a particular orientation, such as horizontal or vertical, in an exact location in the visual field [...]. Complex cells are feature detectors that generally cover a larger receptive field, and respond when a stimulus of the proper orientation falls anywhere within their receptive field, not just at a particular location. [...] Still other cells, called hypercomplex cells, require that a stimulus be of a specific size or length to fire." (Burton, Weston & Kowalski, 2012, p143)

My brain immediately went to point due smut and produced an analogy with gaydar. Simple cells only detect "lines" of their particular orientation in specific circumstances - they can only be chatted up in a bar or at a club or wherever. Complex cells notice everything and anything that fits their particular orientation (and can presumably be propositioned anywhere). Hypercomplex cells are picky size queens, given they're requiring their stimulus of a particular size and length before they can fire...

I then had to stop and tell my brain to behave so I could continue on with my study.

I suspect I may have to ease off the slashfic for a while. It's hard enough trying to study psychology as it is (my brain keeps getting all intrigued by the various processes described in the textbook, and tries to slow down so I can watch things happening...), I don't need my brain talking with my ficbrain and bringing in my libido from gods know where (it certainly isn't talking to my reproductive bits) to giggle at things.

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I've decided to archive my stuff at "An Archive Of Our Own", and today I got the invite and created an account. At present, it's mostly putting up my back archives of work (so I have a copy of things somewhere other than my hard drive, for future reference), and I'm going to try to stick to about ten items a week until I have the backlog posted, probably across the whole variety of fandoms I've written in.

Have a dekko - it's over here if you're interested.

At present, I'm just grabbing what's available (one item from each fandom, in a range of fandoms), so the first ten are up, and they range from fun and silly right the way through to hot and heavy. I'm trying to get them put up as close to the original "publication" order as possible, so the dates I'm using are the dates I last edited the original files on the hard drive.

(Oh, and why AO3? Well, I figure it's a damn sight easier to have everything in the one place rather than trying to keep track of multiple lists across multiple archives and journals. Plus they're a bit more flexible in their policies than the Pit of Voles.)

This entry was originally posted at http://megpie71.dreamwidth.org/25719.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

This semester, I've decided to pick up a couple of psychology units, because I'm interested in tacking social psychology (or indeed any psychology) onto the side of my computer science degree as a way of making things a bit more interesting. I figure the computer science will teach me the what and how when it comes to dealing with computers, while the psychology side I'm picking up in an effort to try and figure out why they've become the sort of mega-meta-tool they are now.

So I'm up to week two, attempting to recover from the massive kick in the hip pocket I've taken by purchasing my textbooks (two subjects, textbooks coming to the better part of $300, we're on the dole... oh well, I didn't need to eat anyway), and attempting to keep up with the reading. Thanks be to the gods I'm only studying part-time, since that means I have two days a week where I can pretty much devote my time to things like setting up a decent meal in the slow cooker, then spend the entire day scribbling down notes.

Today, however, I am functioning on approximately 5 hours sleep, if that. Why? Well, through an interesting concatenation of circumstances last night, I wound up browsing my way through my LiveJournal archive. It was interesting seeing where I'd been (I was also digging through old posts on fanficrants, because I can't for the life of me remember what I did there - it was over five years and two computers ago, and I've long since lost the email archives which record these things), but I got so distracted that before I knew it, it was 2am, and I realised I needed to get some sleep. I set the alarm to wake me for 7am, and I'm now drinking my first cup of coffee in months before I get back to writing notes from the textbook for one of my subjects for the next couple of hours before diving out the door to go to today's lecture and tutorial.

I think when I get home tonight, it's going to be a case of "dig out some frozen leftovers from the freezer" (the slow cooker is a godsend, because I can cook up large meals, serve up some of them, freeze the rest, and save myself from having to try and think about cooking on my Uni days), have dinner, and then collapse and sleep. Particularly since I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow at 7.30am (because that way I'll hopefully get in before my GP has had a chance to get massively behind in her schedule).

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Title: Dreams
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Prompt: Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth/Cloud: “The dreams in which I’m dying / Are the best I’ve ever had”
Rating: Australian M
Warnings: Violence, alluded character death
Summary: The dreams feel so real when they happen. What could he have done to make someone so determined to destroy him?

( He wakes, gasping )

( Author's Notes )

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News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch meanwhile accused the "blogosphere" of "terrorising many senators and congressmen who previously committed" to support the US legislation. - from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-18/wikipedia-goes-offline-to-protest-us-piracy-laws/3781382

Oh gods. How terrifying! How anarchic! How frightening!

Voters actually asking that duly elected representatives represent their constituents and listen to the opinions of said constituents rather than obeying their corporate masters without question!

The End Of The World (According To Rupert) Is Nigh.

Why, anyone would think the USA was a representative democracy, rather than a corporate oligarchy. And we all know that isn't the case...

More seriously and less sarcastically, I'd argue that anything Mr Murdoch publicly supports as a Good Idea these days is probably the option which is more likely to reduce the general public's freedom of speech and expression and increase the gatekeeping role of his family's media empire. News Corporation makes most of its money through being a media gatekeeper, through deciding who gets to be heard publicly, deciding which topics are "serious" and which aren't, and selling more and more advertising space surrounding the scant speech they're permitting through the gates these days. To Mr Murdoch's family corporation, I'm nothing more than a set of eyeballs, a bundle of demographic information (the most important piece of which is "how much discretionary income do I control?") and a wallet to be raided.

Unfortunately for Mr Murdoch and News Corporation, I tend to think of myself as a person, with opinions, tastes, preferences, and values, and as a being with more intrinsic worth than just my demographics and my income. I gave up on their products years ago, when I realised I wasn't going to find anything I considered interesting amongst them. I switched off the television, I stopped buying newspapers, I stopped listening to the radio, I stopped going to the movies, I stopped buying mass market magazines (my preferences are found more in the special interest areas these days) and I stopped attempting to participate in "popular" culture. Which means I've pretty much removed myself from their ambit.

I don't depend on News Corporation or Fox for my entertainment needs. I don't need to wait for the latest thing from Hollywood. I'm not hanging out to hear the latest "celebrity" gossip. I haven't spent money on new music CDs in months (and the last ones I bought were a couple of cheapish compilations from the service station nearest the university I attend). I'm choosy about my books and my magazine purchases. And I can afford all of this because I have the internet to supply a lot of the needs I have for text related materials, for entertainment, for news and for opinion fodder - and not much of what I'm reading online is curated and gatekept in the way Mr Murdoch would prefer.

I get my news via RSS feeds from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Pressenza, and Human Wrongs Watch. I get my community information via RSS from Shakesville, Hoyden About Town, Making Light, and a few other blogs I like. I don't use Facebook, or Google Plus; I've never seen the point of "web portals" when the bookmarks bar in Firefox works just fine, and my Twitter account is used very rarely. I blog on Dreamwidth (because they allow me to crosspost to my InsaneJournal, and they don't regard me as a source of content to use to sell advertising space - something which is positively refreshing these days).

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Firstly, may I say congratulations to the USAlien Media and Entertainment sector for creating one of the biggest showings of unity I've seen online in nigh twelve years of using the internet. Couldn't have done it without you guys, although I'm sure you're hating to see it happen.

Secondly: a word of warning to the USAlien Media and Entertainment sector, as well as to Mr Murdoch's News Corporation and any other group who thinks these acts are Good Things overall. Should they go through, SOPA and PIPA aren't going to reduce the amount of copyright piracy occurring online by one tittle or jot. Yes, they may black out sections of the web, temporarily. But the pirates aren't going to let that stop them - they get their jollies from working around things like this in the first fscking place.

I foresee a certain amount of revival for a few of the older internet communications protocols - newsgroups may see something of a resurgence, along with mailing lists, and other forms of communication which aren't hosted by a single site, but which rather exist as an amorphous entity of ever-changing data being passed around from host to host, like the prize in a gigantic online game of pass-the-parcel. Good luck dealing with those, guys; I seem to remember that the thing which eventually took down a lot of the alt.binaries newsgroups wasn't any effort from the MPAA and the RIAA, but rather that web hosting was cheap, readily available, and distributed file sharing networks could handle things without too much strain.

But hey, guys, feel free to try and take down global email using lawyers if you really fancy re-running the labours of Heracles. Try killing NNTP. Have fun. It'll keep you all busy for a bit.

As has been said repeatedly: the internet as a whole, as an emergent entity, interprets censorship of just about any kind as damage, and figures out ways to route around it.

Thirdly: even if the USAlien Media and Entertainment sector should get their will, and kill the internet deader than a dead thing in a graveyard, I still won't be connecting my television up to the aerial or purchasing a Foxtel subscription. I still won't be turning on the radio to anything other than the ABC. I still won't be going to the movies. I still won't be buying any Australian newspapers on a regular basis. I still won't be getting magazines from Australian Consolidated Press or the News Corporation stables. And I won't be spending any money on those things for the same damn reason I don't spend money on them now: I refuse to let my money go where I'm not welcome. The news and entertainment sector here in Australia doesn't want to cater to me as a viewer, listener or reader, they just want to sell me as a potential set of eyeballs to advertisers. As a person, I'm not welcome in their world.

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* Opens back door of house *

* Flings 2011 out of door, followed by heavy suitcase *

* Slams door *

* Yells "And fucking STAY out!" through window. *

* Slams window *

* Re-opens window to yell "Good riddance!" *

* Slams window again *


(Yeah, it wasn't the best of years this past 12 months. Here's hoping 2012 is a bit better. Or heck, maybe the Mayans were right, and the world will end.)

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We've not been receiving our free local newspaper recently, which is sort of a pity. However, it appears they've found a new distributor for our area, and a copy showed up on our front verge this afternoon. And what a pleasant surprise it was...

Front page headline: 'Drag Strip' anger

My partner made a comment about this being rather misleading - "well, y'know, I was enjoying the show right up to the point where it became obvious that she was... well, she wasn't a she, if y'see what I mean."

My mind, being the FF7-fixated thing it is, immediately started scripting the article:

( Article under the fold )

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These past few days I've been feeling like crap. Hence no post yesterday. I'll try to get one out for tomorrow.

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