Tatiana Azundris

MacBook, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways!

Surviving the Mac, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the 'book (A guide for emigrants from X11-based unices)

Updating Snolo contendere

There is no 'from.'
Not in the sense that one is immersed in, influenced by a single defining culture anymore, save maybe that of the 'net.
We are jet-setters, internetters;
we've all moved for work and for love, time and again.

My culture is cosmopolitan.
My friends are online.
My home is the internet.
—ID:cyborg updated to v1.1

--giants; /* */

It's a tough one, but the question did come up.

Now truth be told, #22 could lay me any time I'm single. Ooooh, Stahl, baby!
But long-term, there might not be enough substance there, it's hard to tell ...

Likewise, I like the art deco elegance of the the Chrysler, but that's up there with old school jazz, pretty dresses, pretty cars, and hardboiled detectives in good hats -- it only works as a dream (until you next need birth control, the internet, or medicine, say -- or token human rights for women). We'd have a dream of a time, but in the end, we wouldn't work out. Much as I appreciate the elegance, some of my sensibilities might just be too modern ...

If a hospital makes a fortune off products derived from blood samples you gave while they were treating you, should you get a share? Or are bodies special?

If we believe in redistribution of wealth to help the poorest, should we also do that for surplus organs like second kidneys? Or are bodies special?

etc.

The most important lecture you will hear this week.

Anne Phillips @ LSE
Bodies as possessions and objects
45 minutes + 30 minutes Q&A

Pornography made for strange bed fellows -- conservative bible-thumpers, and radical feminists. Porn has thoroughly seeped into the mainstream, and some of its users even think of themselves as "edgy" or "transgressive." But is it all the same porn? And is there a simple yes or no answer to it?

I never got that whole sticks and stones thing.

The distinction between actions and words.

Words are actions. "I do." "I declare you husband and wife." "I sentence you to life in prison." "Yes. Yes I am homosexual." "I change my plea to guilty." Who hasn't been consoled by words? Who hasn't been aroused? Who hasn't been hurt? Who hasn't entered into a contract verbally, with every intention of honoring it?

Words are actions.

I think it's funny that grown adults would find (the) writing style (of Lord of the Rings) too dense or boring when I didn't at eight years old.
–Slythwolf

I think the Wolf has her analysis backwards here, because what she observed coincides 100 % with what I'd expect.

If an adult reads Tolkien, chances are that they have already seen a lot of what's good in Tolkien's books in derivative works, so that the originals will hold much less wonder and surprise – leaving only the bits that weren't so stellar. If on the other hand you're eight years old and Lord of the Rings is one of the first fantasy books you read, it's far easier to get pulled in by universe and forgive the faults (the writing, the absence of women, etc.).

In other words, I think what you think of a work that counts as a milestone depends a lot on how many derivative works you have consumed beforehand.

Some things work only once, and if you had that aha! while consuming a derived work, experiencing the original later will seem much less impressive – it did, after all, not give you an epiphany (as you already got that from the enhanced work or copycat).

By that token, I also find the Beatles mindbogglingly boring, while some people credit them with the musical equivalent of inventing the wheel. Well, even so, their work has been expanded on so much that by now, it looks like one of those wheels they use in B.C. or the Flintstones. You appreciate the historic value, but you wouldn't want to use it on a daily basis. The WalkMan was a great step up in portable music from the ghettoblaster, but I still wouldn't trade you my MP3 player for one.

Ich wollte mich aus der Piraten-und-Gender-Debatte eigentlich raushalten, aber naja, the best laid plans of cats and men usw.

Ich sehe, wie da massiv – und eigentlich unnötig – aneinander vorbei geredet wird (teilweise aber auch, so scheint es, aggressiv missverstanden). Das führt dann u.a. zu Vorwürfen, daß viele Piraten das tun was sie anderen (Parteien) vorwerfen, nämlich Meinungen an den Start bringen wo sie keine Kompetenzen besitzen. Ich frage mich, ob die Wahrheit zur Abwechslung nicht tatsächlich mal so simpel ist, wie sie sich darstellt –

Meine vorlaeufige Analyse des Kommunikationsproblem ist diese:

I am not your senorita
I am not from your tribe
In the garden I did no crime

So, they upheld Prop H8 in California, denying homosexual people the right to marry. Not that that right would even amount to much on the federal level anyway, in case you'd wondered. It's quite surreal. As women (and lesbians, and whatever else), most of us are used to systemic and institutional discrimination, to threats, to the emergent properties of all that¹, but it's still surreal to so very openly see it in codified law of a Western country.

Sure, we already live in a golden cage in that as women, we can't easily go to live and/or work in countries that severely limit our freedoms and legal rights², so that's another way our work-options are limited versus men's, but seriously, it feels like suffrage in Switzerland (complete in the early '70s), or interracial marriage in the US ('60s): Open discrimination in actual law seems like a thing of the past in the west, like something from our mothers' and grandmothers' generations. It's like saying, "Yeah, we're discriminating against you, whatcha gonna do about it?" Where is our Loving v Virginia? And will it have as memorable a name?

Woman, John Lennon sang in '72, is the n… of the world; a phrase coined by Yoko. While that phrasing is unfortunate especially by today's standards and invites oppression Olympics, it is very tempting to compare the (nominal) vote for black men and women's suffrage (~50 years lag from the former to the latter), interracial and homosexual marriage (~50 years and counting), the first black president vs not even having had a female vice president. Which all in all seems to guarantee only one thing: black lesbians finish last. That's intersectionality for you.

Clearly the Detox Series (1 2 3) was too cryptic to those readers with better things to do than keeping tabs on persistent trends in fashion photography. I published those pictures here to make a comment on the ongoing trend of the eroticizing of women's discomfort in fashion photography, such as in police brutality, war crimes, withdrawal (the latter having the most obvious connection to my set), the infamous D&G gang rape chic ad, sexy corpses on Next Top Model (which in turn is echoed in shows like Law & Order — Sexy Female Corpse Unit), et cetera. And those, you see, are just the ones I remember off the top of my head; I remember a rape victim shoot in German Vogue ten years before that, and stuff before that, and stuff before that. It's not new. It's just converging, it seems, with the outright torture porn, and the ever-growing tendency towards cruelty in mainstream pornography, because, you see, there is a finite combination of orifices and hair colours, but cruelty is boundless — something to consider if you want to sell more than ten movies.

I was writing this here article, collecting some outtakes — lines that were just too evil, or that wouldn't fit in with anything I was writing/drawing at the time —, but somehow, it never came together. For instance, how do you know you're done? So I guess that means I've finally found a use for twitter …

When Superman grew up in Russia in an alternative history, he was Red Son. Who would Alfred be, Red Butler?

There's such a duplication of concepts in superhero comics. Plastic Man and Elongated Man, for a start. Then, Starfire and Fire are both flying models with big breasts and a ranged energy attack, of course. Corona is another one, a fire elemental from Aquaman. And what's with those ice-themed villains? Killer Frost? Captain Cold? Mr Freeze? Lady Skifahr?

See twitter for more throwaway rubbish — now also in the sidebar!

"Is communication un-sexy?", we asked last week, pretty much en passant. Somehow, the thought stuck in my mind though, and indeed, as a young girl, that was exactly what I was led to believe — that in that perfect, romantic love, the love of my life would know what to do, would have the empathy to sense how I feel, what the right thing to do just now was — in fact, that was not just the hallmark of the True Love, it was the litmus test. If the person couldn't sense, couldn't feel you, you should drop them like a hot potato because obviously, they weren't Mr(s) Right. Of course from there, it's only so far to the rape-glorifying genre of forced seduction, and from there on out to Asshats of Gor.