Monthly Archives: June 2012
Irrational Fears
Last night I was randomly bouncing around TV Tropes a bit before bed, when I stumbled across the Slender Man and was promptly unable to sleep for most of the night. I’d copy the photo here, but I don’t want that creepy thin bastard on my blog!
It’s funny how something can evoke dramatically different reactions in people. Clowns are a classic example, some people think they’re hilarious, others find them boring, and to some they’re terrifying.
I’ve liked horror fiction all my life, especially the more atmospheric types, but I won’t turn down a cheap slasher flick filled with half-naked college kids and spring loaded cats. One of the few things that has consistently scared me for real is the image of a humanoid, but clearly not human, figure in the background. It’s why the first half of Signs terrified me, to the great amusement of my friends in the theater. I think it’s an uncanny valley thing. Or possibly emotional trauma caused by childhood alien abduction.
Come to think of it alien abduction stories are pretty scary, too. Though in that case it’s the helplessness and the ignorance, having no idea what they want or what they’re doing, and being completely unable to resist as they casually take you from your home, where you feel most safe.
The Slender Man is effective on a different level. Especially in the photo on that TV Tropes page, where it’s broad daylight in a park filled with children. You have what’s generally a safe place, you have kids, and you have this… weirdness. It would be creepy without the caption, just because of the instinctive fear for children’s safety.
What’s really neat about that though is going to the Something Awful forum and watching an urban legend being born. I really have no doubt that kids will be telling each other scary stories of the Slender Man soon, if they aren’t already.
It reminds me of Bloody Mary, she of the bathroom mirrors. I encountered that one at the daycare center I stayed at during elementary school. We’d turn out the lights and start the chant. Usually alone, sometimes in a small group. We always stretched things out and hammed it up as much as possible, making a big dramatic production out of it was part of the fun. Often we’d get scared or start giggling and not be able to finish it. By the time we finished the chant we’d be so worked up that any tiny unexpected thing would be terrifying and we’d run screaming back into the light. Naturally, we’d then start exaggerating our experience so that by the third time we told the story we had bloody ghosts reaching out of the mirrors.
Good times!
On a side note, poking around the Slender Man’s background this morning I found a link to the Dionaea House, which I read live near the end of its run in 2004. If I can find time I’ll have to read it again and see if it’s as good as I remember.
Anyway, now that I’ve analysed it a bit, the Slender Man can’t scare me anymore.
At least not in the daylight.
The Mime’s Nightmare
Walking down the street, lost in thought. A shock of pain as his nose hits an unseen wall.
Taken aback, he notices the silence. All is quiet to him now, in the heart of a bustling metropolis.
He feels the smooth surface of the invisible wall, trying to find the edge. Instead he finds a corner, and then another.
Trapped on a crowded sidewalk, in an invisible box. The city’s pedestrians continue past him, deftly stepping aside.
He pounds on the walls and screams, but the people take no notice. They go about their business as if unaware of their surroundings.
He tries to lift, to shake, to rock, but the unseen prison will not move. The people ignore him, he is just another obstacle in the sidewalk.
He looks at the city, and it does not look back. He sees secrets, unexpected beauty and hidden ugliness, but he cannot share them.
With a sinking heart he realizes that they’re all in boxes, unseen personal prisons for each individual. While he cannot see the box that traps him, the crowd cannot see anything else.
Bad day
Some days you just don’t have it in you. I did get a proper post started, but it’s not going up tonight. Maybe in the morning it’ll seem less daunting. Good night everyone.
Ninth Circuit done with Prop 8
Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it would not be hearing Prop 8 in an eleven judge en banc review. For those keeping score, this means the Supreme Court is all that’s left. Prop 8 Trial Tracker has the details.
Since I really have nothing to add to that article, I’m going to address a dissent written by one Judge O’Scannlain, who has apparently written on this subject before. From P8TT, here is Judge O’Scannlain’s dissent in full.
A few weeks ago, subsequent to oral argument in this case, the President of the United States ignited a media firestorm by announcing that he supports same- sex marriage as a policy matter. Drawing less attention, however, were his comments that the Constitution left this matter to the States and that “one of the things that [he]’d like to see is–that [the] conversation continue in a respectful way.”1
Today our court has silenced any such respectful conversation. Based on a two-judge majority’s gross misapplication of Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), we have now declared that animus must have been the only conceivable motivation for a sovereign State to have remained committed to a definition of marriage that has existed for millennia, Perry v. Brown, 671 F.3d 1052, 1082 (9th Cir. 2012). Even worse, we have overruled the will of seven million California Proposition 8 voters based on a reading of Romer that would be unrecognizable to the Justices who joined it, to those who dissented from it, and to the judges from sister circuits who have since interpreted it. We should not have so roundly trumped California’s democratic process without at least discussing this unparalleled decision as an en banc court.
For many of the same reasons discussed in Judge N.R. Smith’s excellent dissenting opinion in this momentous case, I respectfully dissent from the failure to grant the petition for rehearing en banc.
Right. Let’s get one thing straight right away, this has never been a respectful conversation. Ten years ago when it was Prop 22 it was not a respectful conversation. You could see this from the slogans, “Protect Marriage!” as though the existence of same-sex weddings would taint the entire concept somehow. When you speak of people as though they’re a pollutant, you are not being respectful. “Whites only” drinking fountains come to mind. Read the rest of this entry
Transit of Venus
So the lesson I’m learning here is that if I send a picture to the blog from my phone, I only get one and I can’t say anything about it except in the title. Wonder if I can tweak how the blog treats MMS messages somehow.
Anyway, let’s get the other, slightly better picture up here.
I made these using a cheap little pocket spyglass to project the image onto a sheet of paper, and my cheap little cell phone. Technology is awesome.
I’d have liked to get a better image, but I had no way to lock down the little scope and couldn’t hold it still enough for good photography. I had an awful time focusing because this managed to happen on a rare windy day and my paper kept trying to fly away. Still, that I could do it at all is pretty cool, especially since I could send it to the blog from outside. We live in fascinating times!
Symbols
(I should really point out that I’m not an expert on anything. This essay is part personal experience, part faded memories of books read both recently and long ago, and part stuff I found on the internet while looking for public domain images to use. Any correction or discussion is most welcome.)
I’ve always liked symbols, sigils, and signs. My mother tells me that before I started preschool she would sit with me and point out car company emblems in the newspaper, teaching me to recognize them. She thought it would be good preparation for reading. Perhaps my lifelong love of symbols stems from that game, perhaps not, but I’ve always liked the idea that a shape can mean something, can represent a concept, complex or simple, if only you know what the person who made it had in mind.
Anyway, since I need to write more and I’m sick of stuff that makes me angry or depressed, I’m going to write about symbols. Maybe I’ll make a series out of it, there are certainly enough interesting symbols to keep going for a long time. We’ll see.
Right now I’m going to discuss my personal favorite, the pentagram.
As symbols go, this one has some serious history. Variations of this basic shape have been in use for at least five thousand years. It has been a pictogram, standing for the Sumerian word UB meaning angle or corner. It has been a symbol of peace and protection, and also of pain and death. It’s been a part of magic and mathematics. Secret societies and sovereign governments have both used it. In fact so many different and diverse groups have used it in so many different ways that any given pentagram could be intended to mean almost anything. Read the rest of this entry
Why I care about religion.
It’s not uncommon for atheists to be asked questions like “Why do you spend so much time talking about religion if you don’t believe it?” or “If you think religion’s a fantasy, why do you care if other people are wasting their time with it?”
This is why.
(I stole this from JT Eberhard, who got it from his brother. I have no idea where it originated.) Read the rest of this entry
“remember it all started with words”
I was reading up on some internet drama, related to a subject I’d rather not get into here, and I saw this comment, the heart of which I will quote here. This was spoken by an Auschwitz survivor, presumably near the end of his life.
“People get angry when you mention Hitler, but. think of this – he did not go straight to slaughtering [people], who would have stood for that?
He said that criminal were bad, and people not working and contributing [to society], people agreed. Then he said that crazy people and crippled people were not good. I hear that from politician now, in here and America. Difference is that Germans did not know like us, that these illness cannot be helped, not blamed on the victims. They just had no money and were hungry, and saw these people not working either, so they agreed.
He made people hungry and tired, then they believe anything they’re told, a good trick. After that it was too easy to blame the hard times on Jews, on people opposing him, gypsy, Russian, women, writers.
All their fault, shut them up, make them pay. That country was deranged, but remember it all started with words, by saying how people were different. That’s clever. Split people, ignore that we’re all the same with little differences. Make the differences big, make the same small… Then the rest is easy”
There’s really nothing I can add to this. I just wanted those words here.
Dulling the Point
So a while back I was making a purchase on Thinkgeek and decided to spend some of my geek points. These are bonus points you accumulate as you buy stuff, that can be used to get more stuff. Kind of like Camel Cash only you’re not destroying your lungs and they’re less likely to quietly shut down the program leaving you with a sack of now worthless paper that you saved up over ten years of throwing your health and money away. Not that I’m bitter.
Anyway, I chose the green mushroom lamp. To be honest it really caught my eye because it was listed twice with two different geek point costs. (And I totally failed to check how many they actually deducted for it. Accounting seems easier when there’s a dollar sign on the numbers.) It’s the perfect sort of purchase for geek points, something I want to check out that I don’t want to spend actual money on.
The best pic my cheap little phone camera could manage.
I like the strange little lamp, and thanks to it I noticed something interesting about the way contrast changes the character of a room. Read the rest of this entry
“No, YOU’RE a War on Women!”
Twitterfall is a pretty cool thing. If you want to search hashtags while still seeing your normal timeline it’s just what you need. Plus I like that you don’t have to click anything or press a button to see new tweets, they just drop down periodically. Wish it had a better way to track conversations like Twitter proper does.
So once I hooked that up to my Twitter account, I tossed a few searches I thought might be interesting on it. Last night I added #AFPcountdown to keep up with the festivities over Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter party, and that was pretty cool.
Today, on a whim, really, I added #WarOnWomen. This was probably a mistake. So far it’s led to a lot of anger and depression.
I have no doubt there’s a war on women going on, in practice at least. I know this because for the first time in my life birth control is being treated as a controversial subject. I know this because we have emergency room doctors refusing to care for rape victims. I know this because there are people making propaganda videos to portray Planned Parenthood as “targeting baby girls” with their evil, evil abortions. Read the rest of this entry
Preaching Hate
Preachers have been really hard on the gays lately. Our featured asshole today is Curtis Knapp. He’s pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas, and made headlines with his sermon Sunday in which he said this on what to do with those pesky homosexuals:
They should be put to death. That’s what happened in Israel. That’s why homosexuality wouldn’t have grown in Israel. It tends to limit conversations. It tends to limit people coming out of the closet.
So, you’re saying we should go out and start killing them? No. I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.
Just so we’re clear here, this man is saying he wants a government mass-murder program. To nobody’s surprise, this caused a bit of a shitstorm. But he’s not backing down.
“We punish pedophilia. We punish incest. We punish polygamy and various things,” Knapp told KTKA. “It’s only homosexuality that is lifted out as an exemption.”
Knapp argued that his sermon was rooted in Biblical verse.
“‘If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act,’” he quoted from Leviticus 20:12. “‘They shall surely be put to death.’”
Just to keep things confusing, in the King James Bible that should be 20:13, Leviticus 20:12 is about not having sex with your daughter in law. I thought this was a typo until I got confused by some old language and noticed that it is 20:12 in the New International Version.
Anyway, I disagree with the “good” pastor, I can come up with a few more exemptions from that very book. Read the rest of this entry
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 