| woooo |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|09:12 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | happy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Future Sound Of London's Dead Cities : Antique Toy | ] |
A few years ago, a switch in my brain flipped, and I decided I was just done with mucks. I could still see the appeal but I just wasn't interested any more. Which was kind of bad because, well, my boyfriends do still like to muck, and like to have thoroughly impossible fantasy sex via that medium, and the disinterest in mucking pretty much corresponded with starting to live with them and have the relationship actually work out.
A couple of weeks ago, that switch flipped back. I'm still getting all the cuddles and love I need, but I want more - I want impossibility. And I want it a lot more impossible than I ever dared to want it in the old days. So I reappeared on Furry, and on Taps. Ended up spending more time on Taps because, well, it's a lot crazier nowadays.
And today, finally, after a week or two of abortive scheduling attempts, I finally scened with one of my boyfriends. All I can say is... wow. Because one of the things I'm always seeking is an emotional connection with the other person; that's one of the elements that has to be there for a great scene rather than a merely good one. And knowing unequivocally going in that, yes, the person on the other side of the screen loves me enough to sleep with me on a regular basis. tolerate all my foibles, and occasionally say with no prompting just how much better their life is for having me in it... that means that element is a given, there's no chance of me just reading a little too much into the text, and all that I have to worry about is making it beautiful, impossible, and erotic.
And, in this case, dealing with three other people who got sucked into the scene. Yow.
Blue bubbles float up from Kalinda's head and her yoni, swirling and popping with something like giggles... |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|06:05 pm] |
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Well, the last of the promising applications I have out has been unsuccessful; this time, though, apparently the position offered wasn't even being offered. |
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| Cross-Posted from a comment I made at Paul Krugman's blog |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|03:44 pm] |
I live in an inner-ring working-class neighborhood in north St. Louis County, Missouri, don’t drive, and thus spend enough time walking around my neighborhood that I don’t need to check a real estate website to know how many vacant houses there are in a 3 block radius of me, how many for sale signs, and how old those for sale signs are: things have turned around significantly in the last year, right where I’m at, on the residential real estate front. There weren’t very many completely abandoned houses, to start with. All but one of those has been occupied; the last one is undergoing extensive rehab work; judging by the nature of the construction debris, they’ve redone all the walls and floors on the main floor and are putting in new gas appliances now, expensive enough that whatever speculator last bought it at auction clearly expects to get a good price for it. Last winter, there were For Sale signs in the neighborhood that had been up for anywhere from 8 months to a year and a half; now, for sale signs come back down within at most 2 months. I don’t think it’s abandoned properties being banked for “better days,” either; there are cars parked in the driveways or at the curb. I don’t know what to make of it, because major improvement in the housing market is not showing up in the regional stats from the local Fed. And it can’t be because the local economy has “stabilized,” given that we just lost 60% of the workforce at another major employer today. So I know I can’t generalize from it to the entire St. Louis region, let alone the whole upper midwest, let alone the country. But my one neighborhood seems to be doing a lot better than the statistics would suggest, and I don’t know what that means. I could formulate hypotheses, of course; one that jumps out at me is the possibility that inner ring suburbs like mine may be picking up as people foreclosed out of exurban McMansions look for affordable places to live. But I don’t have the means to experimentally verify any hypothesis. So all I have left is my eyes, some shoe leather and what’s left of my knees to walk around with, and an unsatisfied curiosity. |
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| Moron Stupak |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|11:56 am] |
Oops. That was supposed to be "More on Stupak", referring to the Stupak Amendment to the healthcare reform bill, the amendment Kapoor mentioned yesterday that explicitly forbids abortion coverage. Stupak not only forbids any federal plan from offering insurance coverage for abortion, but also forbids any insurance companies who participate in the health exchange market from offering it, too. Apparently he believes that women should pay for their own abortions, no matter how financially burdensome, but anything else is okay.
To be clear: Kapoor is pro-choice. Like any other medical procedure the decision to abort or not should be made by a doctor and a patient together, without interference by bureaucrats public or private. The anti-abortion position is actually advocacy for forced pregnancy, and it's a form of class warfare — a woman with the assets to travel can always go somewhere for her abortion, while those living in poverty cannot. The anti-abortion position also demeans women, in that it asserts that no woman can make the right choice on abortion, so women shouldn't be allowed the choice at all.
On the Democratic side, 31% of Democratic men agree that women can't be trusted to make the right choice, but only 4% of Democratic women feel the same. Here we see the benefits of greater diversity in political representation. In the House, there are 202 male Democrats and 56 female. If the Democratic caucus were split 50/50 between men and women and their voting patterns remained the same, there would have been 213 No votes — nearly enough to overcome the 221 Aye votes. Kapoor wonders, though, if Stupak would have even offered the amendment if half the people he worked with were women instead of only one out of five.
The lesson is that AMERICA NEEDS WOMEN, and that a woman's place is in the House (of Representatives). Until then it'll be men making decisions for women. The only decisions Kapoor wants to make for women is what they wear around him. He's full of ideas for that. |
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| No, really? |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|11:33 am] |
This morning, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kores_rabbit told me this video made her think of me. Which is an odd coincidence, as it's my favorite song, ever. I even bought my current set of glasses because they look rather like David Byrne's glasses in this video. |
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| Under the Rocks and Stones |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|11:00 am] |
After dropping Erin off at work, I drove to Mount Nemo and hiked for an hour. I'm trying get in some aerobic exercise. I still work out a couple of times a week, but I've otherwise been sitting in the house. Mount Nemo is a very cool spot, with 1000 year old cedars, and a lookout point across a plain of farmland toward Rattlesnake Point and Nassagaweya Canyon.
If you squint, you can also see Toronto rising like some sort of legendary citadel out of the brown haze of smog. According to Google Maps, the CN Tower (the largest tower) is 46.15 kilometres (26.68 miles) as the crow flies from the spot where I took that photo.
( More Photos Below ) |
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| ok nevermind |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|11:01 am] |
Okay, so I'm not going gung-ho INTERNET JUSTICE on my roommate. He might be a pretty crappy person, but that doesn't mean I've gotta get goony revenge fantasies about it. Besides, it sounds like he's been turned down for unemployment anyway, and we've managed to throttle back his torrenting just by casually suggesting that the FBI will find him if he downloads more than one movie a month, no need for us to get screwed over for impersonating a federal agency.
Still, the more I get to know him, the worse he turns out to be. He's apparently buying silver coins at under their market value because he's so convinced that the dollar's going to plummet and his money's safer in silver. He's got Jehovah's Witnesses books about the "Great Climax," along with a stack from the Left Behind series. Oh wait, not Left Behind, but "Left Behind: The Kids." (He is twenty years old.) Everybody's out to get him - teachers, landlords, and of course the government. It'd be one thing if he actually was christlike and benevolent, all trying to convert people before the Rapture or something, instead of stealing shit to sell on eBay, presumably to finance his fallout shelter. Any fun ideas for screwing with this guy?
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| Economics & Also Rainforests: data, both surprising & unsurprising |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|02:30 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
First, economist Paul Krugman demonstrates that the much acclaimed benefits Ronald Reagan and his wacky economics actually resulted in an economy that has been growing more slowly. In a follow-up, he provides hard data: Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year
Oh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:
Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year
Sorry: there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. One again, we see how Reagan and the neocons have done their best to weaken the middle class, while making the rich richer, but also less rich than they would have been under a less vile and idiotic regime.
Now for the surprising news, the following NYT article was mentioned in Stewart Brand's fascinating new book Whole Earth Discipline. In the article we find These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster. A bit later on we read “Is this a real rain forest?” Dr. Wright asked, walking the land of a former American cacao plantation that was abandoned about 50 years ago, and pointing to fig trees and vast webs of community spiders and howler monkeys.
“A botanist can look at the trees here and know this is regrowth,” he said. “But the temperature and humidity are right. Look at the number of birds! It works. This is a suitable habitat.” I'm ultimately rather unsurprised that given time and people not continuing to mess with it, the Earth heals itself quite well. I rather suspect that global warming would also slow down well faster than we expect - if (and this is a non-trivial if) we significantly reduce our CO2 output. |
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| Haha, again. |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|03:14 am] |
So Katt Williams was arrested for entering a house he'd been living in for months wile shooting a movie in Georgia. Apparently the movie's producer owns the house, its on a horse ranch, and one of the ranch employees called the cops on him. Does there need to be some kind of national chart or something? They should take the whitest counties in the US, like, anything over 80% white folk, and survey them, and determine which black celebrities the residents of these places recognize on site. The ones who aren't recognized on sight aught to get like, special wavers or something to show to police when this sort of shit happens. "No officer, I'm rich, and I live here," is usually persuasive when true, isn't it? Why not for black celebrities?
Also, in a surprising turn of events--or so I've heard it on the internet--it turns out that Eli Weisel is himself like a Nazi for saying that the tea party protesters using imagery of the holocaust to protest President Obama is in bad taste. |
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| A hopeful story about dealing with gender |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|01:58 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  pleased | ] |
I'm joyfully childfree, but here's a story about raising a child that made me smile. Times are changing. The reaction of the child's parents was positive, but isolated incidents only do so much. However, the reaction of the other parents at the school and of many of the children was a joy to read. This is how culture changes - I'm very hopeful as to what it will look like in 10-15 years. This would not have happened when I was a child, and 20 years ago it would have gone far less well. |
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| Jobquest: Resumes and "trivial" jobs |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|08:38 am] |
You know, I've been leaving my current position at the comic-and-game shop off of my resume, on the assumption that it's somehow "too trivial" and "doesn't look good" for a prospective science professional.
On the other claw, it adds two vitally important things to my resume:
- Evidence that I am, in fact, currently employed; and
- A position that I've held for more than a year -- the only one I've held for more than a few months, since getting my degree in 2003.*
I think I have far too much ego invested in the wrong places. I've been more concerned with presenting myself as a ⟨jonlovitz⟩Scientist⟨/jonlovitz⟩ than as a worker--and I have no idea if that's for the "benefit" of prospective employers, or to sustain my own precarious illusions.
So what looks better? A resume that says "I work in a comic book shop", or one that says "I haven't worked at all since 2007"?
Or have I already answered my own question?
*Aside from my time at AppleOne, which I treat as a single job instead of listing each contract/position individually.
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| Anyone need a video card? |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|08:48 am] |
Hey guys!
I've a spare 8800 GS video card! Its the way overclocked model.
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/5354/1/1/0/
That's it right there, in that review! I've the box and all the bits that came with it. A video card shuffle in this household has freed it up! It was originally supposed to go into another box, but that user decided to pare back to just having her Laptop rather than a desktop, so, I'd hate it to go to waste! |
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| Unhealthy Debate |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|09:27 am] |
Over the weekend, the United States House of Representatives passed a healthcare reform bill that forbids certain abusive practices in the healthcare insurance industry and also provides a public health insurance plan for those who cannot get the coverage they need in the market. The bill passed with 220 votes to 215, with many conservative Democrats voting against their party, and one moderate Republican voting against his. The conservative Democrats who did vote for the bill only agreed to vote aye if they could be reassured that women are not fully human and should not be allowed control of their own bodies — abortion is explicitly not covered by the proposed public insurance plan.
Next is the more conservative Senate, where the Democrats hold 58 seats to the GOP's 40. The two independent seats are Bernie Sanders, socialist from Vermont, and Joe Lieberman, ex-Democrat from Connecticut. Both nominally are part of the Democratic caucus, but Lieberman has vowed that no one is getting health coverage from the government on his watch. The GOP, to a man, have declared opposition, and by custom it takes 60 votes to get anything done in the Senate. A number of other conservative Democrats are also opposed to health insurance reform, so the Democrats are nowhere near 60 votes. There is therefore no chance that the House's bill will pass the Senate.
What will happen in the Senate is that an empty bill with a few perfunctory reforms will scrape through with a simple majority of 51 votes. You might even see Vice President Biden having to cast a tie-breaking vote. The Senate bill just might include a federal public insurance plan, but with one or two of these provisos:
* A "trigger", which would force reform on the industry and maybe even allow creation of a federal plan for all citizens only if the industry's business practices become abusive. In Kapoor's opinion, this is stupid. The industry's business practices are already abusive. Healthcare reform wouldn't even be a matter for debate if they weren't.
* An "opt-out", which would allow states to stay out of a federal plan. Kapoor's lukewarm on this. Any GOP-dominated state legislature is liable to opt out, which is bad for the citizens. On the other hand, once the federal plan's been in place for a few years, those citizens might see that it's in their own best interests to join the plan and vote accordingly.
* An "opt-in", which would create a federal plan, but no one could use it until enough states vote to participate. This is bad, because it makes healthcare reform almost as difficult as amending the Constitution, which has only been changed 18 times (ten amendments all at once, then 17 more over the following 201 years).
Keeping the fractuous coalition of conservative, moderate, and liberal Democrats together is hard enough on the best of days, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama have to deal with a monster of their own creation: Senator Joe Lieberman. In 2006, incumbent Lieberman lost the Democratic primary. He was on the verge of losing his seat, but he decided to run for re-election as an independent (rather, a member of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party). He begged then-Senator Obama to campaign for him against the Democratic candidate (which Obama did), and begged Harry Reid to let him keep his seniority and have a committee chairmanship if the Democrats took the Senate (which they did). Then in 2008, Lieberman campaigned with McCain against Obama, and now he's pledging to block Reid's efforts in the Senate.
Only the Democrats would be wimpy enough to let Joe Lieberman shit all over them without stripping him of his chairmanship and kicking him out of the caucus.
Anyway, after the Senate passes their shell of a bill, they and the House form a committee where a few members from each chamber confer to hammer out the differences. It is this conference committee that the public option must survive. If enough senators and representatives agree that it should stay in, it stays in. The bill in its final form goes to Senate and House for a straight up or down vote, simple majority. At this point, if it gets 218 votes in the House and 51 in the Senate, it passes.
While the men and women on Capitol Hill debate, people without health insurance continue to get sick and die. In all the ongoing debates Kapoor has seen on this subject, only a handful of people have pointed out this cold, hard fact. The GOP talks about competition, but the reason a public option is needed is to create competition — during the long night of conservative governance, large companies bought out competitors and merged so that now they face no competition. The GOP and conservative Democrats talk about out-of-control spending, but they vote routinely in favor of a military budget three times that of any other nation — it's okay to spend money to defend Americans from foreign threats, but not to spend money to save American lives at home? Conservatives talk about personal responsibility, the freedom to be your own boss, and how important small businesses are to driving the economy, but how can one take responsibility for his or her own life with a chronic, untreated illness? How can you take the risk to be your own boss or run a small business if even bad health insurance is unaffordable?
The Republican Party is right about one thing: This health care reform debate is about freedom. It's about freedom from fear. People shouldn't be tied to a bad job because their family needs the insurance benefit. People shouldn't be afraid to start their own business because they couldn't afford to insure their employees. People shouldn't lose the freedom to be responsible for their own lives because they have the bad luck to get sick or injured. Lastly, in a great country like the United States, no one should die because of an detectable, treatable illness because they couldn't afford tests or treatment. A great people shouldn't allow it. |
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