The Breakfast Club

The scroll over text on this new comic from xkcd hurts just a little.

"If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon."

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Ow.

so I quit facebook

I deactivated that social networking site on the weekend. The changes there have made it too hard to keep my activity hidden from, well, one person in particular.

I completely freaked out when facebook suggested that I might want to be "friends" with him. Despite his presence on my list of blocked users. So how could I be assured that it wouldn't "frictionlessly" share my content?

The combination of this and the refusal to pull pro-rape groups whilst pulling breastfeeding pictures leads me to conclude that, just like many, many other male-geek controlled cultures, facebook is anti-women.

That's fine. It's their business. I choose to take away their ability to profit from this woman.

I've also been concerned that, since I joined, despite the ease of being 'in contact' with people, the quality of all my friendships has deteriorated to reading what they 'share' but not actually engaging with them. I can't point the finger at facebook for that, it has been a surprising result to me. I'm not the greatest 'keeping in contact' person (by 'not the greatest', read 'seriously suck') so I figured facbook would be good for someone like me. But I have learned that having people in your 'friends' list is not keeping in contact.

The message box gets stuffed with spam but, unlike email, there is no filter. So in the end I just never looked at them.

So, hello world.

*blinks*

*looks around*

hello blog. I remember you.

An Open Letter to Supporters of Julian Assange,

I too, am a supporter of Wikileaks and the work it is doing.

I too, believe that governments around the world, including our own, are not doing the right thing. And doing the 'right thing' is something that matters deeply to me.

There is one thing, however, that I would like people to shut up about. The rape allegations.

Nice guys rape, smart guys rape, guys who have nice conversations and make girls laugh at the party rape them afterwards, and perhaps even guys who want to change the world might rape.

In fact, most rapes occur by perfectly "nice" guys who disguise that it ever happened by
offering a cup of tea or asking the woman he brutally raped out for dinner.

So, before calling her a liar because she allegedly removed some tweets where she said she was having a good time at a party, just remember that having a nice time at the party doesn't mean a woman wants to have sex. I think every woman is cognisant that any indication that a woman did have a good time prior to being raped is used as evidence that she "wanted it". See: any comments section following an article in the mainstream media about footballers raping women who "had a good time".

Let me be clear, I am not saying he did, I am not saying he didn't. That's for a jury to determine on the basis of evidence presented. Evidence that none of us have seen.

eta: Hoyden About Town has a round-up of links to this very topic.

New Astrophysics!

Once upon a time a fiend of mine accidentally presented a conference poster about The Search for Charmed Hardons. I don't know that it ever made it onto arxiv (an open access site for papers in physics, maths etc.).

Unlike this one from Ehud Nakar.

What do we know about gamma-gay bursts?


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BWAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAetc.

You know one thing, in all my reading, the doctors and head doctors, that no one ever said about depression? That, in the end, it's just boring.

You know it will pass, you know what you have to do to get better, you do all that stuff, and it's hard work, it takes concentration and it's boring.

Today, I am drafting frock patterns and distracting my brain by reminding it how good it feels that my cat chooses to hang out with me often, and how excited i am about one of the bestest ladies in the world coming to visit soon.

yes, i am.

never read the comments section.

This week, again, it seems that there's another round of lady-hating in disguise; from 'femmoz get out ov tha dark ages', to breast cancer awareness(tell me, how does updating your facebook status to "i like it..." bring awareness to breastcancer??? It seems to me more like you're being an active participant in portraying your only worth as being a
object for men's sexual satisfaction - did you see anyone write that they 'like it' somewhere not on display? I didn't think so), via degrading and objectifying women in solar panel advertising.

This article in this morning's Age Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality is starting well - women like teh pr0nz too!, "fundamentalist" and backward author blah blah heard it all before - in what promises to be a lesson on why one should never read the comments section.