Global Damnatio Memoriae: Don’t Feed the Trolls

The Scarlet B Posted on by

For those of you who haven’t seen it, there is apparently a call to, in essence, pretend that Sarah Palin doesn’t exist for a month. While I am enamoured of the concept, I strongly suspect that it won’t work. I’d love for it to – I’d love for her to get the point that she doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, that she is NOT Queen of the Universe. But I don’t think it’s going to work – there will always be people who acknowledge her, and so, job not done. And you know, it’s not even just her specifically, but all the self-important little so-and-sos out there; there are a LOT of people that could stand a stiff dose of being blanked. *chuckles*

And that’s kind of the point – I don’t think you can completely blank someone, even if ‘everyone’ in the entire world wanted to. We are all so interconnected now that this very porous nature of society means there’s always a way for someone to get out or in, or for the trolls to get fed the attention they need to thrive and survive. That’s not even taking into consideration that there will always be someone who wants to be ‘nice’, and not ’cause drama’, and therefore, will just give in to the trolls’ demands for attention. And, perhaps, because communication is so cheap and easy right now, we undercut the value of all our relationships based on the fact that we can have so many. If Friendship X fails, well, Friendship Y is still over here… oh wait, that failed too – I don’t know wwwwhhhhhhy! *giggles* But then, there are those that argue that our leaps in technology have dumbed us down and made us less capable of socializing, and there might be some validity to that argument. Certainly, we all need to step back and evaluate the meaning of friendship on a personal level; the word is too watered down now, much like ‘I love you!’ my childhood home was.

I think that part of the problem is obvious – there is a lack of respect and proper etiquette in this modern day and age. People are too ‘busy’ to be polite; please and thank you look quaint, antiquated. There was an excellent magazine piece on the BBC in this vein; it was a discussion on whether or not ‘Dear’ was appropriate in e-mails. While I am undecided as to my opinion about that specific bit (I cannot remember the last time I wrote Dear anyone; I usually ignore preambles *blush*), I can understand the concern that we’re rushing the English language into its early grave. Text speak, for example, has no place anywhere; I know I can immediately discount someone who is so disrespectful so to send me such a lazy missive. And it’s not like I’m calling for anyone to be hung and quartered over it, but when browsers have built-in spell-check, you’d think that taking half a minute to click squiggly red lines wouldn’t be too much to ask! Because really, in the net-iverse, when all you have to represent yourself is your words, why wouldn’t you want to make them sparkle…

Anyhoos, I am rambling and meandering and all that, so I shall take a moment to say that my story for this week is a weekend showcase for The Chrysalis Experiment. I’m pleased, even if I think that it’s a bit week compliments of my life circumstances this week. But that’s okay – I’ll just have to keep trying to improve and all of that jazz.

And now – off to digest a ball of lard! 😀

Living to Work, Living in Misery

The Scarlet B Posted on by

When I was still serving in the military, I often had people trying to convince me to stay in. Their logic, which I was supposedly deficient for not concurring with, was that all jobs suck. And as all jobs suck, I might as well stick in one that came with health care… and very few choices on what I was getting to do. Rather than settling for the slow destruction of my body and the more rapid destruction of my soul, I chose to depart for greener pastures. I don’t think that anyone should have to stay in a job that makes them miserable just for the sake of having a few coins to rub together.

I simply cannot understand this attitude – no amount of money is worth misery if you can avoid it. Oh sure, we can’t all have our dream job or be rock stars, but we should feel like our work is of some value. Job satisfaction shouldn’t be a pipe dream – it should be the standard. Even a fast-food gig can be fun if you have the right attitude; there is no shame in enjoying crafting tasties for someone else to enjoy.

The big problem, in my opinion, is that society has become incredibly wanty. It’s not completely the average joe’s fault – there are a lot of pressures on them to fit in this mold. From the college experience movie telling them that their life isn’t complete without keggers and STDs to advertisements telling them just how sad and unsexy they are for not buying X and Y. It’s hard to resist this sort of pressure; I presume that conformity provides some queer sort of comfort. I honestly have no idea – I’ve generally been blind to this desire. All I crave is a basic level of comfort and an abundance of time to engage in things that provide me enjoyment.

Having said that, I should probably comment on our current living standards. We work, together, enough hours to make about minimum wage. We could work more to make more, and in future, we might take our business big enough scale to be amongst the idle rich… though I strongly suspect we’d not for the simple fact that we both enjoy working. But still, on those wages, we manage our mortgage, baby, car, and even the occasional vacation as well. This isn’t accounting for the fact that a good chunk of our wage has been going towards the paperwork that enables me to live here; this year should see the last of that past us, giving us even more free cash.

Anyways, I found a good piece that could stand to be shared, and makes for some good thinkery. It’s a few years old, but it’s definitely worthwhile:

Living to Work or Working to Live: Advice for the Dotcom Generation
http://www.bidstrup.com/dotcom.htm

Take what you will or won’t out of it all; we all have our own lives and priorities. I merely speculate on this topic because I see so much pointless misery in the world, and I cannot understand the why of it. 🙂

Happy Friday, or Something Like That

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Happy end of the week to all the normal working schlobs. And, in this case, it includes myself; our business needs to match the normal hours of the normal working people, and all of that. Which is good – I’m direly in need of being away from people. Oh sure, I only have to deal with four others regularly, but that’s too freaking many in a lot of cases. And after this week, oh week of weeks, I desperately need to tune out as fully as possible.

*shuts as many doors between herself and everyone else and revels in the comparative silence*

Perhaps because I’m an introvert, I cherish my weekends as a time to do nothing. I flop around the house, maybe bother to do some chores or try a new recipe, but otherwise, I do as little as humanly possible. Oh, we sometimes think about going and doing something, like a drive or a faire or the like, but it almost never happens; why ‘waste’ time doing things? The week is for things, and the week days are crammed full of working. And as working is a fairly joyful thing (for the most part, though I do have moments where I just want to set everything on fire and run away swiftly) which fills the day in a mainly satisfactory way, I don’t generally see the need to find other… ‘things’ to do. People seem too preoccupied with doing ‘things’…

Whatever the case, I feel I should add something humorous to mark the start of the weekend. The news has kindly obliged me in this by letting me know that Anna Chapman, the Russian spy, will be fronting a Russian TV show. Even if it’s totally rubbish, I’m sure many will tune in for her supposed fappability. I’m sure the only way it could be better to many is if she were fronting The Naked Truth, not that the show appears to be on the air anymore. Not that I approve of the objectification of women, mind (quite the opposite – I do wish people would use less sex to sell things), but the concept of stripping to the news holds some absurd delight.

*flips through the news* Blah blah drama, blah blah zombies, blah blah blah. Oh rolling news cover, you have so much to answer for. Why do you deem it alright to turn us all into crack addicts for the minutae of strangers’ lives? But then, reality tv has as much to answer for that as rolling news does. When talking to one of my best friends earlier today, she started rattling off all these shows, and I just… I blinked, honestly. I watch very little TV – I don’t find it particularly enjoyable, and I think the degree of voyeurism engaged in these days is frankly disgusting. But maybe I need to – I have an addictive personality, and perhaps if I were to engage in a little Teen Mom, I’d not be able to stop myself from the trainwreck.  Yes, trainwreck tv – it serves to make the masses feel better about their lives, I guess? Iunno, if I were any more paranoid than I already am, perhaps I could speculate that it’s an eeevil conspiracy to make everyone so miserable and depressed that they go out and buy shiny objects, and then push themselves further down the spiral of misery by working harder to make more money to buy more shinies…

Eraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase.  Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

*shrugs and grins*

Me, gonna pack up and go home now – enjoy doing your weekend thing, and I’ll enjoy mine. 😉

Us and Them, not Us -or- Them…

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Ho hum, ho hum, the joys of waiting on others. It’s not too bad, considering that I can find things to occupy that time. *smiles and waves*

I hadn’t given a lot of thought about what I wanted to speak about today, but per norm, something did catch my eye. Baroness Warsi made a good point today about how Islamophobia and Muslim prejudice are seen as okay. And you know what – she’s right. In this increasingly and appallingly PC world we live in, we’re not allowed to take out our ire on hardly anyone. Can’t make someone for being fat (but you can be viciously rude to thin girls – thanks, assholes :p). Can’t make fun of someone for being black, but brown is obviously okay (when it’s not). We’re not saints, we all need a punching bag, but why is it fair for any one group to be that punching bag?

This brings to mind my friend Xlyinia, who is rather annoyed with the whole making everyone and everything different from self into the next great evil. She proposes a site that forces people to pop say… a friend’s name into the nastiest articles, and have to think about someone calling them, their friends, their families, such horrible names and things. I think it’s a wonderful idea – I abhor how so many people insist on trying to live in black and white in a gray world, into making it us versus them. How.. how is that even appropriate, I ask?

Don’t get me wrong – there are people I definitely don’t like, and perhaps I catch myself thinking unkind thoughts at groups of people. I try not to; it’s not their fault I get so easily frustrated and worried about herd mentalities. I guess that my gift and my curse is that I don’t understand wanting to belong so badly as to try and change everything about oneself, to stave oneself body and soul to fit unrealistic concepts. That so much of that comes with tearing other people down to feel like you’re… something. I’ve seen people destroy themselves, and their relationships with others for this, and for what? To have other shallow people use your poorly, belittle you, use you? It is those people that I disdain upon, those who would permit and encourage such horrible behavior. They are to be shunned, but too many people are too concerned with ‘being nice’ to take the time to correct abhorrent behaviors…

But I wander so; I’m rather guilty of that in most cases. My mind, she meanders as she sees fit, and I’m rather captive to these whims. *smiles* I guess the point is that I cannot understand the us versus them mentality that so many people rely on to feel ‘big’. I understand that it’s pretty much the norm, insomuch as I’ve often had it applied to me in spite of me making it clear that I don’t operate on those premises, and find it rather contemptible – no real friend would make you choose sides, or tell you how to be.

Or maybe that’s just me. I guess I’ll figure it out someday. 🙂

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Hello from the land of Grog, which seems to be the magical kingdom I currently inhabit. I’m not nearly as wonky-out as yesterday; this time yesterday, I was snoring in my bedroom. The temptation to repeat that is strong, though on my mother-in-law’s bed – yes, I’m attempting to get some work done. Thus far, this seems to encompass sipping coffee and yawning, and trying to not come off biting when I explain that I don’t want to nap, please don’t assume that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, blah blah blah.

If you couldn’t tell, I hate naps. I cannot remember a time I ever liked them. 🙂 Even as a kid, I’d try to skive out of them, never mind that Mom wouldn’t believe it when I came in five minutes after she put me down pretending that hours had passed. <<

And whato, what’s this? A clever lead-in to the news that the government wants to get up in the parenting grill from birth?! Part of my mind is busy boggling at the thought that someone could be so daft as to not realize that babies need love and attention, while another part is aghast that I’m supposed to believe this enough to say that the government should have the power to evaluate, and keep evaluating, my child the second she popped into the world.

PLOP! – It’s a girl!

Ah, but she doesn’t know ‘Bah Bah Black Sheep’ at 20 seconds old, so she’s obviously deficient. TO THE BACK OF THE LINE WITH YOU!

I know, I know – the PC brigade has made it ‘Bah Bah Wooly Sheep’. I won’t be teaching it to my children as such. *grins*

But  back to the point – why is this even news? Why should the government immediately think they should muck their paws in? What excuse is there for ignorance in this digital day and age? Come on – libraries have free internet, and have for years. But I also abhor the implication that people are bad parents because poor OBVIOUSLY means ignorant – I maintain anyone who shoves their child off to a nanny every day all day is a pretty shit parent. Your nanny is probably an ace parent, but can you yourself claim to actually know your child? And no, shuttling them back and forth from school and practice isn’t quality time, mes amis. But I know that it’s a losing argument – too many people are convinced that money is the true way, and all my hippy-dippy preachings of simplifying life will never serve to convince someone that their annual vacation abroad is a luxury, not a necessity.

True, variety is the spice of life, and that everyone living their own and different life is meaningful. But that doesn’t make me any less alarmed by the mismanaged prioritization I see in so many these days. If we spend some time with good old Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, we can see that too many people are grasping for belonging and esteem while ignoring physiological and safety needs. Grasping for things at the top without a secure foundation isn’t a wise thing to do – the whole structure of ones’ life can and will come tumbling down. But can we fully blame people for this sort of behavior? Not really, no – we are a society that has forgotten the value of patience, that all good things come to those that wait. Instead, we see a lot more grasping and nownownow behavior, the why of which I admit to not being able to understand.

I can understand wanting a rocketcar, though  – we’re totally supposed to have those by now. *nods firmly*

Anyways, just some random thoughts, loosely organized against a haze of chemical reprogramming – enjoy!

My Kingdom for a Can…

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Hookay, here I am, less than a week in, and already wishing  I had some canned articles. There’s a good reason for it – I started on a new medication this week (last night), and it’s putting me flat out on my back.  I could barely shoo my family out of the house fast enough this morning so I could pass out… with the cat curled up next to me as tightly as possible… yet on top of a pointy, pokey book.

Good job, Batman.

The cat, not the superhero.

I still want to write a piece on what I left dangling yesterday, and even now, the resources I gathered for it are sitting there, taunting me. Maybe my head will unfuzzy enough for me to do something with it tomorrow, though I suspect that it’s going to take me several days to find enough brain power to do anything more than the shallowest thoughts. Which is fine – it doesn’t take a lot of energy to roll my eyes at Facebook being forced to admit to being massively insulting to their user base (reminding me that, once again, I’m very happy I have absolutely no personal data on there at current), or at Sarah Palin making a botch of it all again. Oh, she’s not to blame for the murder specifically, but I will say that all the parties on both sides of the aisle using nasty rhetoric are incredibly guilty of setting a bad example.

But then, I take umbrage in general with how hateful the average American is, and why they think it’s okay to be quite so hateful. But then, I supposedly deserve it, veteran or not, because I’m an evil former American. Yes, because the second someone moves away, they surrender their US citizenship… NOT. *snorts* I try to have some patience – the children that grew up in the wake of 9/11 have been fed an increasingly strict diet of patriotism, hatred, fear, and exceptionalism. And even amongst my friends and family back stateside, I get some amazingly vehement attitudes suggesting that I’m horribly wrong for attempting to encourage dialog, that there’s nothing to be fixed, and that I’m a hateful person for wanting to dissect what is good and what is bad to make it better! It hurts the brain, mes amis, it does. 🙂

Anyways, Nurse Batman is poking me to make sure that I’m doing alright, so I think I’ll wrap this up short and see if I can finish any other tiny tasks today without drooling on myself. I hope everyone has a  lovely day, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll manage that other piece I’ve been thinking about… later this week.

The Business Report… From the Dining Table

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Oh yes, I’m oh-so-terribly droll for writing this from ‘work’. *snorts* I mean, I am at work – I’m curled up around my laptop on my mother-in-law’s dining table, which is our desk. Leah is cheerfully running amok and letting us know what she thinks of this and that, and I’m just sort of off in my own mind. I might expand on the specific why of this specific lost-in-thoughtitude… but not quite yet.

However, it serves to frame what’s on my mind outside of that specific issue right now – parenting and work. It would make sense that these are often in my head, as they’re oh… things I can’t quite escape from. The articles in specific, however, would be two goodies from the BBC:

Inflexible and Stressful Work ‘Harming Families’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12201262

and

Mothers Admit to Parenting Lies, Netmums Survey Says
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12192050

Now, the former seems like a massive duh, though I must admit – the number of hours respondents are purported to work kind of make me blink. I sincerely have a near-impossible time understanding why people have so many ridiculous money problems. Even when I was single and made a near-fortune (I was clearing $3,000+ a month when I was in the Air Force), my other single co-workers were constantly out of money and trying to beg me for loans. And even now, making significantly less than that and having  a kid and a mortgage, I cannot understand what madness and guilt drive people to work such insane hours. My husband and I work to live, not live to work. And while the nature of our business means it’s a non-stop part of our life (as is the burden of self-employ), we just… y’know… get on.

Actually, this is where the second article comes in – pressure to be the perfect parent. To insist that little Alice and Dermot are always doing something; I get the impression that kids aren’t supposed to be kids anymore. That if you let your kids go play instead of sending them to dance classes and extra languages and instruments, that you’re failing your child. And that, obviously, people feel horrible because they dare to lapse and let their child oh… play. I sincerely hope their campaign is successful in getting people to quit feeding each other bollocks, and that people y’know… admit they’re not always perfect. Seriously, I have some almost crippling perfectionist tendencies, so I tend to get irked by this sort of junk.

All in all, it kind of wraps up to thus – there is a lot wrong in society today about what is important or not. A vacation isn’t a necessity – it’s a luxury. Electronics – luxuries, not necessities. Food, clothing, shelter – if you’re unable to obtain these because your brand new Range Rover, then you’ve probably done something wrong. Life and society as a whole is just too much like a game of Jenga these days – people insist on building on top of unstable foundations.

I realize this is all just random blathering, with no backing data… so sue me. *giggles* I guess the point that I’m trying to make, that I’m always trying to make, is that people need to simply (maaaaaaan). But then, I realize that I’m so completely outside of the mainstream that I might as well be shouting into the wind. That’s all blogging is, really – letting words and letters flow slippery across data streams, watching the occasional snippet stick on a rock or twig as it makes its inevitable way towards infinity.

But then, why would I want to understand and be a part of the mainstream? People use groupings to harm each other, to belittle, to puff themselves up. I find these actions so reprehensible that I’d rather be isolated than be forced to participate in such things. And while, sure, I do think well of myself to myself and perhaps occasionally poorly of others, it’s more that I want to understand why people do the things they do. Man, I really should’ve taken a sociology class…

Anyways, the pieces are becoming fragments are becoming dust, so I’ll wrap this up before I sound any more hot-air philosophical. Hooray, hooray, for sparing you all the pain of that. 😉 Though I will add before I go that the third prompt for The Chrysalis Experiment is up, so I need to start thinking about that…

[[radio edit]] I’m working on gathering up some thoughts on the living to work versus working to live thing for tomorrow; fingers crossed my brain will make things make sense! ^__^

Living a Typographical Lie (Broken Bits)

The Scarlet B Posted on by

As some of you probably noticed with my first post, I’m a double-spacer. I started in with it after getting blessed out by a boss during my military time, and hadn’t thought about it since. After all, we’re supposed to be obedient or something of the like, and as I needed him to not stab me in the face at that exact second, especially since I needed his help getting a replacement badge…

I hadn’t quite realized how much spleen there was against those of us who whap space twice at the end of a sentence, so I decided to investigate to see which was the proper method after spotting a rather bile-fueled piece on Facebook.  And, after reading about, I must acquiesce that I am in the wrong; a single space was always the intent, and it only became double space because of monospaced fonts of ye olden days. It’s going to take my hands some time to get used to doing it ‘right’, so bear with me while I figure this out. 😉

Another thought that I wish to mention today is how evil bed thinking is. Every morning, I’ll be lying there, thinking about how I don’t want to move, and I’ll have these great ideas to write about come into my head. I’ll drill myself on whatever it may be, confident that I’ll remember until I get to my computer.

Can you guess what happens?  Can you?

Of course, I don’t remember by the time I get to my computer, and this morning, I get to suffer a horrible song that had popped in as reminder (Seether – Broken; I’m not a fan of Amy Lee and all the horrible karaoke she spawns). So I’m sitting here, wondering what broken bit I was thinking about this morning. Was it thinking about tomorrow’s appointment? I don’t think it was, but not the ‘what’ will elude me all day… que sera, sera.

This is where I’d like to put something newsy, but really… it’s Sunday. Rolling news or not, what happens on Sundays, really?  I keep drifting back to an article I’ve seen on Facebook the last couple of days and wincing. I do take umbrage at governments power-grasping at every little thing, and I resent the fact that the world is so lead by fear. That people are convinced that absolute safety can exist, and should exist, and that if we just continue to fork over all our liberties, it can happen.  Great, not only do I need to get rid of my water bottle, I need to be immediately committed to an asylum, too? Brilliant! And with the spectrum of mental ‘diseases’ growing wider and wider every year, I guess that means we all get to hang out in the happy house – woo hoo!

Suffices to say, I look forward to a day when maybe, just maybe, common sense will resurface. It’ll be nice to see a day when people accept that they absolutely cannot be protected from anyone, and that it’s time to grow up, just a teense, and accept that there’s always going to be bad people doing bad things, and that we all, y’know… sort of need to do our part. And, y’know… treat people like people instead of figures? Jeebus, I could do a whole ‘nother rant on figure manipulation; perhaps I’ll pencil it in for another day.  For now – have a lovely day, etc.

Well Then, What Now?

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Hola, m’dears.

This is my first attempt at a foray into public blogging.  My ‘real’ blog is my Livejournal; the control freak in me likes knowing who can come and go and comment and read and interact with me.  But after a practice run into public blogging, I figured I’d close that out and start here with a proper go.

There is a problem, though… I don’t really know what to write about.  I had told myself that if I ever did ‘real’ and ‘proper’ blogging, it would be thematic.  That’s not looking like it’s going to be the case, outside of ‘random crap from my life’ and ‘ohai, this looks interesting’.  I’m tempted to just select a bit out of the news daily and comment on it, but I guess we’ll see as I go.  Per norm (for those that know me), my point is to elicit commentary and discussion so as to further myself as a person, and to try to make the world a better place.

Also hopefully, I can trick my family into actually following this one, since they tend to reject my harder-to-access options. *chuckles*

My thing of interest today is the concept of neurosexism.  I came across this term early today after my friend Karinne linked to a piece on the tyranny of pink.  I abhor the falsehood that the world can only exist in black and white (or blue and pink), and was enjoying reading some pieces about the psuedoscience that is used to continue to push the idea that male and female are so radically different.  That girls like pink because it reminds them of babies and berries (a falsehood – the group tested had grown up being told that blue was for boys, and that pink was for girls).  That boys like blue because the sky is blue, and it inspires their hunter ways.  It upsets me that it’s used to make people less than what they can be – that men are supposedly bad at communication, and that girls are horrible at construction and maths and the like.  But that’s the core of neurosexism – that we’re supposedly all wired in x or y (har har) way, and that because of that, we’re just screwed at being good at things.  I can’t read a map because I’m a girl (bollocks), and my husband cannot articulate his feelings because he’s a boy (also bollocks – the only thing slowing him is a stutter).

And that’s not even getting into how gender binary is still used to this day to marginalize people because they don’t identify as the sex that they’re born.  I’m slowly learning about this due to some of my dear dear friends, but I definitely have a lot more to learn about this.

Anyhoo, that is probably enough for a starter – welcome, and erm…  stuff! 🙂