Because today has not been a good day and there was a strong temptation to write a post called, "Just shoot me now," in which I explained that it's possible to be totally not suicidal and still feel like death is a non-objectionable proposition, I figured maybe it was best to write about some day other than today.
So once upon a time not long ago my sister asked me if getting a reality soul would be selling her soul. I said yes. Of course it would be. But the soul market is over-saturated and souls are not worth what they once were so the real question is whether or not what she gets in return is worth her soul.
What she hopes to get in return is, basically, her farm. One of the annoying things that happened today was that a video camera turned off without warning and good footage of her was never recorded in which she really explained in sincere ways what she hoped a landing the reality show could do: getting people to see the farm, see the people on it, see past the odd appearance into the reality of it, understand what it is worth, become invested in it because it's something worth investing in, and so forth.
Because the alternative, the one evil aunt who was responsible for turning it into a drug trafficking capital wants, is to sell it to someone who will destroy it to make 15 condominiums for old people so he can milk money out of the aging and death of the baby boomers. This will, of course, involve cutting down the trees, that will in turn change the water situation (the trees sucking up water is the only thing stopping the area from being wetland) but that's no problem because the developer in question illegally fills in wetlands and even though everyone knows he does it no one has been able to prove it in a legally binding way and thus he gets away with it. He's perfect for my aunt.
When I was little my mother would point to housing developments and say, "When I was little this was all farmland." Now I'm old enough that she doesn't have to because I can look out the window of the car as we drive by and know for myself, "When I was little this was all farmland." The farms have given way to homes for people who barely even live in them. Homes for rich people who are somehow drawn to living for a week or two a year on a patch of land that was once a farm and is now one gate away from becoming a gated community.
At least the condominiums for old people idea involves the farm being destroyed for houses people will actually live in.
But I'm getting off topic here. There's a call for a reality show set on a farm, and as a result of my sister showing an interest in selling her soul by becoming a reality show person it was requested that she set up a channel where she had various people who would likely be on the farm during said show answer some questions.
And so, some days ago, she recorded me talking. And thus I am on youtube on a channel not my own. It's a short clip (she cut most of what I said) and the sound quality is for crap, but it's better than talking about my day today. So, go, view this thing.
Learn about the weeping willow that rose from the ashes of its own destruction.
I have no idea what the odds are that she actually gets the show.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
If you should lose credit cards or similar objects...
So all of my cards, of which there are five (two credit, one food, one ID, one bank card) went missing. Normally this wouldn't be particularly distressing as things go missing all the time and then turn up later just fine, but I'm rather low on food so the loss of the food card was rather distressing as without it I can't eat without getting into debt I might never be able to pay back. (Have you seen the interest rates of credit cards? If you get yourself in a position where you're paying interest instead of paying off your balance pre-interest you're probably screwed for life.)
Then something strange started to happen. First it was the credit card I use least often, then my ID. They were showing up in the wash but not, oddly, when I was washing my clothes.
I check the machine to make sure nothing is left in there between loads (I wash my sister's clothes; if something can fit inside a washing machine I've probably found it in there after transferring her clothes to the dryer) so what the fuck? Mere moments ago I finally figured out.
It seems that the type of washer I have has seams in its metal construction that are just the right size for a credit card or similarly shaped object to fit into. Once they get stuck in there they can wait as long as they damn well please to come out.
I now have all my cards. Yay.
If you should lose your cards by forgetting to empty your pockets before washing your [whatever garment you keep them in] don't just check for loose things in the washing machine, feel around inside to see if anything is caught in any of the cracks. God only knows how long they'd take to shake loose on their own.
That is my wisdom for the day.
Then something strange started to happen. First it was the credit card I use least often, then my ID. They were showing up in the wash but not, oddly, when I was washing my clothes.
I check the machine to make sure nothing is left in there between loads (I wash my sister's clothes; if something can fit inside a washing machine I've probably found it in there after transferring her clothes to the dryer) so what the fuck? Mere moments ago I finally figured out.
It seems that the type of washer I have has seams in its metal construction that are just the right size for a credit card or similarly shaped object to fit into. Once they get stuck in there they can wait as long as they damn well please to come out.
I now have all my cards. Yay.
If you should lose your cards by forgetting to empty your pockets before washing your [whatever garment you keep them in] don't just check for loose things in the washing machine, feel around inside to see if anything is caught in any of the cracks. God only knows how long they'd take to shake loose on their own.
That is my wisdom for the day.
The Darkest Hour; sidekicks ascendant
[Spoilers, by the way.]
As a general rule, American movies are about Americans. There are exceptions,* but mostly they're about Americans. So The Darkest Hour, which is set in Moscow, of course centers around a couple of Americans. But something interesting happens that you might not expect.
The movie is so focused on them that you might not even notice.
They're not the heroes. They bump into the heroes, they play messenger between heroes when one dies but has information and technology that the others need, they hide behind the heroes and even occasionally aid them, but they're not the heroes.
If this were Red Dawn then the ones shouting, "Wolverines!" would be the group of Russians that saved the Americans' asses partway through and then kept on saving their asses as the movie went on. It was even made very clear, this was their home and they were going to defend it. "I can go no further, for I have Moscow at my back," a hero said to the Americans as they ran away in a nuclear submarine that belonged to still more Russians.
And as they ran away the heroes gave the Americans a job to do. Not a hero's job, a messenger's job. "Today we learned how to fight, go and teach the others what we know." Note the "we" in there. It could include the Americans, it might not, but it distinctly isn't, "Today you learned how to fight, go and teach the others what you know."
Remember that guy in Independence Day who was sitting at a table tapping out in Morse code how to blow up the alien ships (wait for them to deploy the big fucking gun and then send an explosive right up its barrel)? You probably don't. Because that person wasn't one of the heroes. He was just a messenger. That's what the Americans are.
The Americans do not discover that Faraday cages can protect them from detection, this in spite of finding something that would otherwise light up like a beacon to the aliens inside of a Faraday cage. No, a Russian discovered that and converted his entire apartment to a Faraday cage, put the light on to attract other survivors to him, and built a fucking weapon to defeat the aliens in his home in between doing all that other stuff.
He's hero number one, the genius inventor who discovers the aliens' weakness. He dies for two reasons: first, a member of the American's group (an Australian herself) doesn't listen to a Russian who, though younger, proves smarter than she is. When an alien shows up rather than follow the person who knows what she's doing (Vika, the Russian) she instead leads the alien right back to the protected room which, as Vika predicted, they didn't have time to do. Specifically the door can't be closed behind them in time, the Faraday cage is breached, and the genius inventor is now face to face with an invisible alien. To protect the survivors he grabs prototype weapon number one and uses it on the alien. It works, but only stuns the alien. Then it shorts, preventing him from firing again. That shorting is the second reason he dies.
He knew he didn't have enough power, but could only work with what he had.
His sacrifice buys time to save the remaining members of the group who grab prototype two and meet up with Vika and they all head toward the submarine (Vika previously translated a repeating signal in Russian announcing the location of the sub and how long it would stay there.)
With hero one gone the Americans plus Vika seem pretty well screwed. They have prototype number two, but it only stuns the aliens and knocks out their shielding. Conventional weapons are needed to finish the job.
As they run like hell they eventually are saved by the real heroes. The ones who are not willing to abandon their home to alien invaders and are prepared to stand and fight. Without the inventor's weapon (a microwave gun, don't ask) they're only able to wound the aliens but they've none the less done quite well for themselves and are there to defend any survivors, Americans included, that they should find.
They too have made their headquarters into a Faraday cage.
When they learn of the sub they have no intention of going to it because unlike the Americans they aren't going to run away. When the Americans, and Vika, decide to go to the sub on their own a small detachment, including the heroes' leader, decides to give them escort on what would otherwise be a suicide mission. (The leader makes sure to delegate responsibility before he leaves, he's not going to leave his people leaderless.)
And so they go, shit happens, they lose another American bringing their compliment down to two and they then get separated from one of those. Along the way they all notice the aliens operations and while the Americans are baffled the Russians have been able to deduce what's going on (the aliens are there to mine the earth, killing off the indigenous population just makes it easier.)
When they reach the sub the sub's acting commander (the actual captain has died) wants to leave on schedule but is managed to be convinced to stay long enough for the others to get the separated American. (The fact that she sent up a literal flare helps with this, as they now know where to look.) It is then that the Russians on the submarine are able to build a second microwave gun and improve on dead-Russian's design because of greater resources.
The commander stays with the sub, the Russians staying in Moscow escort the remaining American to find the missing American, Vika is to stay behind because of her age.
The remaining American delivers his last bit of information from the dead-Russian inventor, a way to make the mircowave gun do more than it otherwise would by getting aliens in close proximity, connecting them electrically, and then firing on them. In this case getting them over water. And so water is spilled for a trap.
This fails. Utterly. The American's plan is for shit because the aliens aren't stupid enough to go over the water and into the trap. Enter Vika with Molotov cocktails. The plan is saved when to avoid the fire the aliens inch over the water and enter the trap. Bang, bang, bang no more aliens there. (Many more throughout the rest of Moscow but small victories.)
The two remaining Americans reunite and with Vika make it back to the sub where they separate from the Russians who are staying in Moscow. The dialogue I told you about before is given.
The Americans and Russians on the sub learn that around the world the extremely depleted human population is fighting back and gaining ground. In the words of one of the Moscow bound Russians, the extermination is over, the war has begun.
And that's the plot of the entire movie. Notice anything?
The Americans accomplish almost nothing on their own. They act as, basically, messengers and delivery people.
The Americans don't make the microwave gun, a Russian does.
The Americans don't duplicate the microwave gun. Russians do.
The Americans don't improve the microwave gun. Russians do.
With, I think, all of one exception, the Americans don't fight off the aliens, the Russians do.
The trap that an American thought up, which was only thought up because of information he got from a Russian, didn't work until Vika, a Russian, made it work by forcing the enemy into it at great risk to herself.
The Americans aren't even responsible for their own getaway, the Russians are.
The Americans are not the heroes. They're the people who either hide behind or give support to the heroes. They're the foreign sidekicks. You might miss that fact because the movie focuses on them, but that's the way it is. They don't accomplish anything, instead they help other people accomplish everything.
They deliver the radio which is still working and tuned to the right frequency to pick up on the sub's signal to the inventor and Vika. They deliver the microwave gun to the sub. They deliver the information about getting more bang for your battery by getting multiple aliens together in a state where they can be electrically connected to the people who can actually use that information.
They deliver a couple (maybe a few) bits of information and one object. That's all they accomplish. (And they kill that one alien. Far fewer than the Russians do.) Everything else is left to the real heroes of the movie: the Russians.
You know how every bad movie set in medieval times has a Chinese sidekick to provide the kung fu and gunpowder? The Americans in this movie are that Chinese sidekick without the kung fu and gunpowder. They're sidekicks, and not very impressive ones at that.
This is, for me at least, a different direction for movies to take and, honestly, I like it. First off, if you're going to have Americans in Moscow for the alien invasion you should not under any circumstances have them save the world. Moscow is full of people and the odds that some random foreigners are going to be the ones best equipped to solve the problem are exceedingly low.
But given that you've still got a choice of focus. Now I know that it really wasn't about deciding that maybe this once the sidekicks deserved to be the story's focus but instead a desire to have the Americans be the story's focus, but even so I like giving the focus to the non-heroes.
There's something nice about having the movie be centered on not the hero who saves the day but rather the people who hide behind them. It wouldn't do to have all movies focus on such people, but with almost every movie focused on the heroes it's good to have a movie focus on someone else for a change.
They're support characters, needy characters, characters who need an escort because without it they'll be dead, and they have stories too.
-
* For example, The Three Musketeers:
The Three Musketeers: Part 1 and Part 2, 1911 (Don't know if these still exist.)
The Three Musketeers, 1914 (ditto)
The Three Musketeers, 1916 (I think the link goes to the right place but there's only one in stock and it has very little info.)
The Three Musketeers, 1921
The Iron Mask, 1929
The Three Musketeers, 1933 (John Wayne version)
The Three Musketeers, 1935
The Three Musketeers, 1939 (comedy)
The Man in the Iron Mask 1939
The Three Musketeers, 1948 (Gene Kelly and Lana Turner version)
The Two Mouseketeers, 1952 (Tom and Jerry version. Honestly these four things are just annoying to track down. No links for them.)
Lady in the Iron Mask, 1952 (Amazon does not have this either.)
At Sword's Point, 1952 (The protagonists are the children of the original Musketeers)
Touché, Pussy Cat!, 1954 (sequel to the Tom and Jerry version above)
Tom and Chérie, 1955 (Third of the Tom and Jerry cartoons)
Royal Cat Nap 1958 (Fourth and final installment of the Tom and Jerry version)
The Three Musketeers, 1969 (Christopher Walken version which has never been released on any form of video)
The Three Musketeers, 1973 and The Four Musketeers, 1974 (I grew up on these, and the 1993 version, but these first. Raquel Welch is my mother's favorite Constance.)
The Return of the Musketeers, 1989 (Sequel to The Three Musketeers, 1973 and The Four Musketeers, 1974)
The Three Musketeers 1992 (Animated. If you want it on DVD you need to buy a three movie pack.)
Ring of the Musketeers, 1992 (A movie about modern day descendants of the Musketeers that includes John Rhys-Davies and David Hasselhoff, what could possibly go wrong?)
The Three Musketeers, 1993 (Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Chris O'Donnell, Tim Curry, and Gabrielle Anwar version)
The Man in the Iron Mask, 1998 (Jeremy Irons is awesome in this, for the record)
The Man in the Iron Mask/The Mask of Dumas, 1998
The Musketeer, 2001 (Have you ever wanted to watch a painfully long and painfully dull aerial fight taking place on wooden ladders? Then this is the movie for you! Otherwise, I don't really recommend it.)
Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers, 2004
La Femme Musketeer, 2004 (John Rhys-Davies again, anyway D'Artagnan's daughter teams up with the sons of the three and attempts to prove that she's as awesome a swordsman as any man, or something like that. It's not as if I've seen all of these.)
Barbie and the Three Musketeers, 2009
The Three Musketeers, 2011 (Airships! That are actually ships, in the air. Not much else to recommend it.)
3 Musketeers, 2011 (Asylum version)
As a general rule, American movies are about Americans. There are exceptions,* but mostly they're about Americans. So The Darkest Hour, which is set in Moscow, of course centers around a couple of Americans. But something interesting happens that you might not expect.
The movie is so focused on them that you might not even notice.
They're not the heroes. They bump into the heroes, they play messenger between heroes when one dies but has information and technology that the others need, they hide behind the heroes and even occasionally aid them, but they're not the heroes.
If this were Red Dawn then the ones shouting, "Wolverines!" would be the group of Russians that saved the Americans' asses partway through and then kept on saving their asses as the movie went on. It was even made very clear, this was their home and they were going to defend it. "I can go no further, for I have Moscow at my back," a hero said to the Americans as they ran away in a nuclear submarine that belonged to still more Russians.
And as they ran away the heroes gave the Americans a job to do. Not a hero's job, a messenger's job. "Today we learned how to fight, go and teach the others what we know." Note the "we" in there. It could include the Americans, it might not, but it distinctly isn't, "Today you learned how to fight, go and teach the others what you know."
Remember that guy in Independence Day who was sitting at a table tapping out in Morse code how to blow up the alien ships (wait for them to deploy the big fucking gun and then send an explosive right up its barrel)? You probably don't. Because that person wasn't one of the heroes. He was just a messenger. That's what the Americans are.
The Americans do not discover that Faraday cages can protect them from detection, this in spite of finding something that would otherwise light up like a beacon to the aliens inside of a Faraday cage. No, a Russian discovered that and converted his entire apartment to a Faraday cage, put the light on to attract other survivors to him, and built a fucking weapon to defeat the aliens in his home in between doing all that other stuff.
He's hero number one, the genius inventor who discovers the aliens' weakness. He dies for two reasons: first, a member of the American's group (an Australian herself) doesn't listen to a Russian who, though younger, proves smarter than she is. When an alien shows up rather than follow the person who knows what she's doing (Vika, the Russian) she instead leads the alien right back to the protected room which, as Vika predicted, they didn't have time to do. Specifically the door can't be closed behind them in time, the Faraday cage is breached, and the genius inventor is now face to face with an invisible alien. To protect the survivors he grabs prototype weapon number one and uses it on the alien. It works, but only stuns the alien. Then it shorts, preventing him from firing again. That shorting is the second reason he dies.
He knew he didn't have enough power, but could only work with what he had.
His sacrifice buys time to save the remaining members of the group who grab prototype two and meet up with Vika and they all head toward the submarine (Vika previously translated a repeating signal in Russian announcing the location of the sub and how long it would stay there.)
With hero one gone the Americans plus Vika seem pretty well screwed. They have prototype number two, but it only stuns the aliens and knocks out their shielding. Conventional weapons are needed to finish the job.
As they run like hell they eventually are saved by the real heroes. The ones who are not willing to abandon their home to alien invaders and are prepared to stand and fight. Without the inventor's weapon (a microwave gun, don't ask) they're only able to wound the aliens but they've none the less done quite well for themselves and are there to defend any survivors, Americans included, that they should find.
They too have made their headquarters into a Faraday cage.
When they learn of the sub they have no intention of going to it because unlike the Americans they aren't going to run away. When the Americans, and Vika, decide to go to the sub on their own a small detachment, including the heroes' leader, decides to give them escort on what would otherwise be a suicide mission. (The leader makes sure to delegate responsibility before he leaves, he's not going to leave his people leaderless.)
And so they go, shit happens, they lose another American bringing their compliment down to two and they then get separated from one of those. Along the way they all notice the aliens operations and while the Americans are baffled the Russians have been able to deduce what's going on (the aliens are there to mine the earth, killing off the indigenous population just makes it easier.)
When they reach the sub the sub's acting commander (the actual captain has died) wants to leave on schedule but is managed to be convinced to stay long enough for the others to get the separated American. (The fact that she sent up a literal flare helps with this, as they now know where to look.) It is then that the Russians on the submarine are able to build a second microwave gun and improve on dead-Russian's design because of greater resources.
The commander stays with the sub, the Russians staying in Moscow escort the remaining American to find the missing American, Vika is to stay behind because of her age.
The remaining American delivers his last bit of information from the dead-Russian inventor, a way to make the mircowave gun do more than it otherwise would by getting aliens in close proximity, connecting them electrically, and then firing on them. In this case getting them over water. And so water is spilled for a trap.
This fails. Utterly. The American's plan is for shit because the aliens aren't stupid enough to go over the water and into the trap. Enter Vika with Molotov cocktails. The plan is saved when to avoid the fire the aliens inch over the water and enter the trap. Bang, bang, bang no more aliens there. (Many more throughout the rest of Moscow but small victories.)
The two remaining Americans reunite and with Vika make it back to the sub where they separate from the Russians who are staying in Moscow. The dialogue I told you about before is given.
The Americans and Russians on the sub learn that around the world the extremely depleted human population is fighting back and gaining ground. In the words of one of the Moscow bound Russians, the extermination is over, the war has begun.
And that's the plot of the entire movie. Notice anything?
The Americans accomplish almost nothing on their own. They act as, basically, messengers and delivery people.
The Americans don't make the microwave gun, a Russian does.
The Americans don't duplicate the microwave gun. Russians do.
The Americans don't improve the microwave gun. Russians do.
With, I think, all of one exception, the Americans don't fight off the aliens, the Russians do.
The trap that an American thought up, which was only thought up because of information he got from a Russian, didn't work until Vika, a Russian, made it work by forcing the enemy into it at great risk to herself.
The Americans aren't even responsible for their own getaway, the Russians are.
The Americans are not the heroes. They're the people who either hide behind or give support to the heroes. They're the foreign sidekicks. You might miss that fact because the movie focuses on them, but that's the way it is. They don't accomplish anything, instead they help other people accomplish everything.
They deliver the radio which is still working and tuned to the right frequency to pick up on the sub's signal to the inventor and Vika. They deliver the microwave gun to the sub. They deliver the information about getting more bang for your battery by getting multiple aliens together in a state where they can be electrically connected to the people who can actually use that information.
They deliver a couple (maybe a few) bits of information and one object. That's all they accomplish. (And they kill that one alien. Far fewer than the Russians do.) Everything else is left to the real heroes of the movie: the Russians.
You know how every bad movie set in medieval times has a Chinese sidekick to provide the kung fu and gunpowder? The Americans in this movie are that Chinese sidekick without the kung fu and gunpowder. They're sidekicks, and not very impressive ones at that.
This is, for me at least, a different direction for movies to take and, honestly, I like it. First off, if you're going to have Americans in Moscow for the alien invasion you should not under any circumstances have them save the world. Moscow is full of people and the odds that some random foreigners are going to be the ones best equipped to solve the problem are exceedingly low.
But given that you've still got a choice of focus. Now I know that it really wasn't about deciding that maybe this once the sidekicks deserved to be the story's focus but instead a desire to have the Americans be the story's focus, but even so I like giving the focus to the non-heroes.
There's something nice about having the movie be centered on not the hero who saves the day but rather the people who hide behind them. It wouldn't do to have all movies focus on such people, but with almost every movie focused on the heroes it's good to have a movie focus on someone else for a change.
They're support characters, needy characters, characters who need an escort because without it they'll be dead, and they have stories too.
-
* For example, The Three Musketeers:
The Three Musketeers: Part 1 and Part 2, 1911 (Don't know if these still exist.)
The Three Musketeers, 1914 (ditto)
The Three Musketeers, 1916 (I think the link goes to the right place but there's only one in stock and it has very little info.)
The Three Musketeers, 1921
The Iron Mask, 1929
The Three Musketeers, 1933 (John Wayne version)
The Three Musketeers, 1935
The Three Musketeers, 1939 (comedy)
The Man in the Iron Mask 1939
The Three Musketeers, 1948 (Gene Kelly and Lana Turner version)
The Two Mouseketeers, 1952 (Tom and Jerry version. Honestly these four things are just annoying to track down. No links for them.)
Lady in the Iron Mask, 1952 (Amazon does not have this either.)
At Sword's Point, 1952 (The protagonists are the children of the original Musketeers)
Touché, Pussy Cat!, 1954 (sequel to the Tom and Jerry version above)
Tom and Chérie, 1955 (Third of the Tom and Jerry cartoons)
Royal Cat Nap 1958 (Fourth and final installment of the Tom and Jerry version)
The Three Musketeers, 1969 (Christopher Walken version which has never been released on any form of video)
The Three Musketeers, 1973 and The Four Musketeers, 1974 (I grew up on these, and the 1993 version, but these first. Raquel Welch is my mother's favorite Constance.)
The Return of the Musketeers, 1989 (Sequel to The Three Musketeers, 1973 and The Four Musketeers, 1974)
The Three Musketeers 1992 (Animated. If you want it on DVD you need to buy a three movie pack.)
Ring of the Musketeers, 1992 (A movie about modern day descendants of the Musketeers that includes John Rhys-Davies and David Hasselhoff, what could possibly go wrong?)
The Three Musketeers, 1993 (Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Chris O'Donnell, Tim Curry, and Gabrielle Anwar version)
The Man in the Iron Mask, 1998 (Jeremy Irons is awesome in this, for the record)
The Man in the Iron Mask/The Mask of Dumas, 1998
The Musketeer, 2001 (Have you ever wanted to watch a painfully long and painfully dull aerial fight taking place on wooden ladders? Then this is the movie for you! Otherwise, I don't really recommend it.)
Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers, 2004
La Femme Musketeer, 2004 (John Rhys-Davies again, anyway D'Artagnan's daughter teams up with the sons of the three and attempts to prove that she's as awesome a swordsman as any man, or something like that. It's not as if I've seen all of these.)
Barbie and the Three Musketeers, 2009
The Three Musketeers, 2011 (Airships! That are actually ships, in the air. Not much else to recommend it.)
3 Musketeers, 2011 (Asylum version)
The annoying bit of stupidity in Resident Evil: Retribution (Spoilers)
See the thing in the title that says "spoilers"? Yeah, there are spoilers here.
Ok, so there was just a free preview weekend and since I know that with my limited income and my dwindling savings at some point I'm going to have to ditch having TV coming in altogether a free preview weekend basically represents a frantic scramble to not just get as many of the films that I want as I can but also all the films I might ever want because at some point my ability to watch movies will be limited to what I have recorded.
I got a little under 30% of what I identified as potentials recorded. A fair amount of that was simply overlapping times, but some came down to fuck ups. The satellite receiver shut down for routine updates wiping out two things one night. The next night I got a fresh DVD, removed the full DVD, and then somehow played a shell game on myself ending in putting the full DVD back in so there was just enough space left to record enough to show what I was trying to get, and then it cut out before I could get those three movies.
And one of the surprises when the frantic rush ended was that I got Resident Evil: Retribution three times. What happened was this: one of the earliest attempts at taping was to get the movie, and it did, but it didn't get everything it was supposed to get and I got confused and thought the movie was one of the things it didn't get. So I was still on the lookout to get it. Which I did, mostly. I missed so little that only someone who has an obsession with getting the whole thing, including the full opening and closing credits, would think another attempt worthwhile. (Guess what kind of person I am.) As it turned out when things were coming down to the wire I found myself on the lookout for anything that would fit into a certain slot so the time wouldn't be wasted and Resident Evil: Retribution, both sets of credits included, did.
So as someone who has three copies of the damn thing, and has just recently watched it with details fresh in my mind, I feel at least somewhat qualified to speak on the matter.
-
The movie starts where the last left off: Alice and crew have just taken the Umbrella ship but a fleet of evil aerial vehicles are coming in to kill everyone because a Resident Evil movie having a happy ending is impossible. (Contrast this with the games where happy endings come standard.) Explosions, people dying, Alice being knocked off the ship.
Then Alice wakes up in suburbia with a different hair cut. At first it seems like she might be being gaslit but as the scene progresses she does more and more to indicate that she knows exactly what is (supposedly) going on and yada, yada, yada the undead attack, they bump into Rain, Alice puts up a good fight and defends her deaf daughter, but eventually she dies.
With no explanation we cut back to the Alice we know without clothes being interrogated.
Stuff happens, characters from the games show up (Ada Wong, Leon Kennedy) and with agonizing slowness we learn what's going on.
The Red Queen (AI from the first movie) isn't dead because... Jasper? And Albert Wesker (from the games, who I thought should be played by Christopher Walken when I saw Walken on a talk show with that haircut, and who was killed off in the last movie) isn't dead because... a wizard did it?
The Red Queen has taken over Umbrella (evil corporation that makes zombies and worse) and thus kicked Wesker (former head which is a thing from the movies only) out causing a strange situation where Wesker is now on Alice's side in spite of spending a good solid two movies (out of the four previous) trying to kill her, possibly by vivisection or just plain eating her.
And with all of that mind screw through with we now come to the meat of the matter:
Alice took out all of Umbrella's surviving facilities, save one, in the space between movies three and four. So only one survives to show up in this movie. That one wasn't being used as a base of operations as it had a different purpose entirely. It was designed for three purposes, though I think only two are mentioned but I seriously can't believe it wasn't designed with all three in mind: testing, demonstration, and disinformation.
The suburbia scene we saw earlier was actually inside of what amounted to a giant movie set. It could allow any or all of three things to happen: Examining how things went down when the undead were unleashed upon suburbia, showing perspective buyers how things went down when the undead were unleashed upon suburbia, tricking someone into thinking the undead had already been unleashed upon suburbia.
And so the facility had things set up to look like various places, Moscow, New York, and Tokyo all come up.
Of course, to have an undead outbreak you need living people and so the facility also included a giant cloning apparatus so that every setting could be populated by real live human beings (they'd be given memories and skills to fit their roles in the current simulation.) It is noted that every time there's a test a lot of humans end up dead/undead/whatever. It's bad, you see.
And the reason we saw Alice in suburbia was that she was one of the basic models that was cloned to populate these death scenarios.
Ok, now we're all caught up to speed.
Giant cloning facility, Red Queen inside, Albert Wesker outside, Ada Wong infiltrating, Alice escaping, a team coming in to meet them, a little deaf girl who thinks Alice is her mother because a now-dead clone of Alice was playing that role in the most recent simulation, stuff.
Here's where the whole thing goes sideways and gets fucked up.
The Red Queen was the antagonist of the first movie because she was trying to save the human race. That was her purpose and she was willing to commit mass murder to do it. If she had to kill everyone involved in order to stop the virus from getting out then by God she was going to do it. For her the blood on her holographic hands was nothing compared to what would befall humanity if the virus got out.
She was killed because some people thought that they'd really rather live and they could do that without letting the virus out. For what it's worth, they were right. The virus got out after the two survivors of that group were captured and the people who did it then did something very stupid (they opened the facility in which the virus was contained and in so doing unleashed it upon the world.)
That's the Red Queen's entire character: She will do whatever it takes to give humanity as a whole the greatest chance of survival even if it means killing off the protagonists because humanity's odds are marginally better if they die in a contained space than make it to freedom.
The Red Queen is the protector of humanity. The mass murdering, occasionally sadistic, protector of humanity. Her only purpose is to protect humanity. Her character is driven entirely by her desire, her need, to protect humanity.
Have I hammered this point home enough?
Apparently some zombie met the Red Queen on the road to Damascus and converted her because now, without explanation, she's trying to wipe out humanity.
That makes sense how?
That's not the annoying bit of stupidity.
Two movies ago, movie three, Alice met up with one of the Red Queen's siblings. An AI of a different color but clearly the same line. (The AIs like to express themselves as holograms, and the holograms are in the form of a little girl for reasons that made sense at the time.) That AI explained to Alice that the facility she was in, one which Alice did not, so far as we know, blow up, contained everything Alice needed to reverse the effects of the virus. The zombies would become people again, humanity would be saved, and the AI was going to help Alice with that task.
The only reason it hadn't been done before was that Alice herself was an important component of that whole thing. Umbrella tested on all sorts of people but Alice was the only virus carrier they could find. And whatever it was about Alice that made her that way happened after they got the samples from which the clones were made. Thus locked within Alice was the key to being able to have someone infected with the virus not turn into a monster and unlocking that secret would allow them to turn the monsters back into people.
We haven't heard from the good AI since and Alice has not returned to the facility with everything needed to save the world because she's been busy. But that would seem an important thing to think about. It's been left out of the movies since then.
That's not the annoying bit of stupidity.
This is:
At the end of the movie it's learned from the "Hey, didn't I kill you already?" Albert Wesker that all that remains of humanity is in a relatively small area of what was once Washington D.C. Because of the "Hey, didn't I kill you already?" Red Queen's campaign of total genocide against the entire human race, whom she is sworn to protect as her only purpose in life, humanity is a species on the brink of extinction.
What all of this means is that it would help, really help, if the surviving humans had some sort of way to get a lot more humans to bolster their numbers. What they could use more than anything right now would be some sort of giant cloning facility where the clones could be given whatever memories or training was required for the moment in order to support the other surviving remnants of humanity and even the odds against the seemingly never ending supply of undead.
The clones, it's demonstrated pretty clearly, are in fact people even if they are created at whatever their current age is (mostly adults) and their memories, if they're given them, are lies. The clones, thus, are humanity, a rather large part of it, and humanity's last best hope.
So, you would think the movie would be about taking over the cloning facility and using it for good, right?
Whether you would or not the answer is no. A scratching the edge of extinction humanity with a desperate need for more people that learns of a facility that has the answers to their every prayer in the form of the one thing they need more than anything else (People) decides that the best course of action is to blow the facility up.
What.
The.
Fuck?
Compared to that the amount of time (forever and a day) it takes Alice to realize that maybe she should remove the mind control device from her ally Jill Valentine --so Jill will stop trying to kill and start trying to help her-- barely registers as a problem.
There are two possible ways to save humanity at this point. One is to go back to the facility with the resources needed to turn zombies back into people. The other is to make use of the cloning facility to start growing humanity because this whole war of attrition thing has not been going their way.
The first is not even considered, the second is blown up.
Unless the Resident Evil movies exist to teach us that humanity is too stupid to live something is seriously fucked up here.
Even more so because movie three ended with an understanding of the value of clones. Alice and her many clones all teamed up to take down the common enemy that was Umbrella. That's how Umbrella was basically eliminated in the space between movies three and four. The only resources left to Umbrella after the great anti-Umbrella clone team up were a boat and the cloning/testing/demonstration facility featured in Resident Evil: Retribution.
Saying to a bunch of clones, "Hey, the world is fucked up, want to help me fix it?" demonstrably works. This movie was one with a whole bunch of clones in various flavors and a desperate need for people to help fix the fucked up world. No one considered making use of the clones. Again: what the fuck?
Ok, so there was just a free preview weekend and since I know that with my limited income and my dwindling savings at some point I'm going to have to ditch having TV coming in altogether a free preview weekend basically represents a frantic scramble to not just get as many of the films that I want as I can but also all the films I might ever want because at some point my ability to watch movies will be limited to what I have recorded.
I got a little under 30% of what I identified as potentials recorded. A fair amount of that was simply overlapping times, but some came down to fuck ups. The satellite receiver shut down for routine updates wiping out two things one night. The next night I got a fresh DVD, removed the full DVD, and then somehow played a shell game on myself ending in putting the full DVD back in so there was just enough space left to record enough to show what I was trying to get, and then it cut out before I could get those three movies.
And one of the surprises when the frantic rush ended was that I got Resident Evil: Retribution three times. What happened was this: one of the earliest attempts at taping was to get the movie, and it did, but it didn't get everything it was supposed to get and I got confused and thought the movie was one of the things it didn't get. So I was still on the lookout to get it. Which I did, mostly. I missed so little that only someone who has an obsession with getting the whole thing, including the full opening and closing credits, would think another attempt worthwhile. (Guess what kind of person I am.) As it turned out when things were coming down to the wire I found myself on the lookout for anything that would fit into a certain slot so the time wouldn't be wasted and Resident Evil: Retribution, both sets of credits included, did.
So as someone who has three copies of the damn thing, and has just recently watched it with details fresh in my mind, I feel at least somewhat qualified to speak on the matter.
-
The movie starts where the last left off: Alice and crew have just taken the Umbrella ship but a fleet of evil aerial vehicles are coming in to kill everyone because a Resident Evil movie having a happy ending is impossible. (Contrast this with the games where happy endings come standard.) Explosions, people dying, Alice being knocked off the ship.
Then Alice wakes up in suburbia with a different hair cut. At first it seems like she might be being gaslit but as the scene progresses she does more and more to indicate that she knows exactly what is (supposedly) going on and yada, yada, yada the undead attack, they bump into Rain, Alice puts up a good fight and defends her deaf daughter, but eventually she dies.
With no explanation we cut back to the Alice we know without clothes being interrogated.
Stuff happens, characters from the games show up (Ada Wong, Leon Kennedy) and with agonizing slowness we learn what's going on.
The Red Queen (AI from the first movie) isn't dead because... Jasper? And Albert Wesker (from the games, who I thought should be played by Christopher Walken when I saw Walken on a talk show with that haircut, and who was killed off in the last movie) isn't dead because... a wizard did it?
The Red Queen has taken over Umbrella (evil corporation that makes zombies and worse) and thus kicked Wesker (former head which is a thing from the movies only) out causing a strange situation where Wesker is now on Alice's side in spite of spending a good solid two movies (out of the four previous) trying to kill her, possibly by vivisection or just plain eating her.
And with all of that mind screw through with we now come to the meat of the matter:
Alice took out all of Umbrella's surviving facilities, save one, in the space between movies three and four. So only one survives to show up in this movie. That one wasn't being used as a base of operations as it had a different purpose entirely. It was designed for three purposes, though I think only two are mentioned but I seriously can't believe it wasn't designed with all three in mind: testing, demonstration, and disinformation.
The suburbia scene we saw earlier was actually inside of what amounted to a giant movie set. It could allow any or all of three things to happen: Examining how things went down when the undead were unleashed upon suburbia, showing perspective buyers how things went down when the undead were unleashed upon suburbia, tricking someone into thinking the undead had already been unleashed upon suburbia.
And so the facility had things set up to look like various places, Moscow, New York, and Tokyo all come up.
Of course, to have an undead outbreak you need living people and so the facility also included a giant cloning apparatus so that every setting could be populated by real live human beings (they'd be given memories and skills to fit their roles in the current simulation.) It is noted that every time there's a test a lot of humans end up dead/undead/whatever. It's bad, you see.
And the reason we saw Alice in suburbia was that she was one of the basic models that was cloned to populate these death scenarios.
Ok, now we're all caught up to speed.
Giant cloning facility, Red Queen inside, Albert Wesker outside, Ada Wong infiltrating, Alice escaping, a team coming in to meet them, a little deaf girl who thinks Alice is her mother because a now-dead clone of Alice was playing that role in the most recent simulation, stuff.
Here's where the whole thing goes sideways and gets fucked up.
The Red Queen was the antagonist of the first movie because she was trying to save the human race. That was her purpose and she was willing to commit mass murder to do it. If she had to kill everyone involved in order to stop the virus from getting out then by God she was going to do it. For her the blood on her holographic hands was nothing compared to what would befall humanity if the virus got out.
She was killed because some people thought that they'd really rather live and they could do that without letting the virus out. For what it's worth, they were right. The virus got out after the two survivors of that group were captured and the people who did it then did something very stupid (they opened the facility in which the virus was contained and in so doing unleashed it upon the world.)
That's the Red Queen's entire character: She will do whatever it takes to give humanity as a whole the greatest chance of survival even if it means killing off the protagonists because humanity's odds are marginally better if they die in a contained space than make it to freedom.
The Red Queen is the protector of humanity. The mass murdering, occasionally sadistic, protector of humanity. Her only purpose is to protect humanity. Her character is driven entirely by her desire, her need, to protect humanity.
Have I hammered this point home enough?
Apparently some zombie met the Red Queen on the road to Damascus and converted her because now, without explanation, she's trying to wipe out humanity.
That makes sense how?
That's not the annoying bit of stupidity.
Two movies ago, movie three, Alice met up with one of the Red Queen's siblings. An AI of a different color but clearly the same line. (The AIs like to express themselves as holograms, and the holograms are in the form of a little girl for reasons that made sense at the time.) That AI explained to Alice that the facility she was in, one which Alice did not, so far as we know, blow up, contained everything Alice needed to reverse the effects of the virus. The zombies would become people again, humanity would be saved, and the AI was going to help Alice with that task.
The only reason it hadn't been done before was that Alice herself was an important component of that whole thing. Umbrella tested on all sorts of people but Alice was the only virus carrier they could find. And whatever it was about Alice that made her that way happened after they got the samples from which the clones were made. Thus locked within Alice was the key to being able to have someone infected with the virus not turn into a monster and unlocking that secret would allow them to turn the monsters back into people.
We haven't heard from the good AI since and Alice has not returned to the facility with everything needed to save the world because she's been busy. But that would seem an important thing to think about. It's been left out of the movies since then.
That's not the annoying bit of stupidity.
This is:
At the end of the movie it's learned from the "Hey, didn't I kill you already?" Albert Wesker that all that remains of humanity is in a relatively small area of what was once Washington D.C. Because of the "Hey, didn't I kill you already?" Red Queen's campaign of total genocide against the entire human race, whom she is sworn to protect as her only purpose in life, humanity is a species on the brink of extinction.
What all of this means is that it would help, really help, if the surviving humans had some sort of way to get a lot more humans to bolster their numbers. What they could use more than anything right now would be some sort of giant cloning facility where the clones could be given whatever memories or training was required for the moment in order to support the other surviving remnants of humanity and even the odds against the seemingly never ending supply of undead.
The clones, it's demonstrated pretty clearly, are in fact people even if they are created at whatever their current age is (mostly adults) and their memories, if they're given them, are lies. The clones, thus, are humanity, a rather large part of it, and humanity's last best hope.
So, you would think the movie would be about taking over the cloning facility and using it for good, right?
Whether you would or not the answer is no. A scratching the edge of extinction humanity with a desperate need for more people that learns of a facility that has the answers to their every prayer in the form of the one thing they need more than anything else (People) decides that the best course of action is to blow the facility up.
What.
The.
Fuck?
Compared to that the amount of time (forever and a day) it takes Alice to realize that maybe she should remove the mind control device from her ally Jill Valentine --so Jill will stop trying to kill and start trying to help her-- barely registers as a problem.
There are two possible ways to save humanity at this point. One is to go back to the facility with the resources needed to turn zombies back into people. The other is to make use of the cloning facility to start growing humanity because this whole war of attrition thing has not been going their way.
The first is not even considered, the second is blown up.
Unless the Resident Evil movies exist to teach us that humanity is too stupid to live something is seriously fucked up here.
Even more so because movie three ended with an understanding of the value of clones. Alice and her many clones all teamed up to take down the common enemy that was Umbrella. That's how Umbrella was basically eliminated in the space between movies three and four. The only resources left to Umbrella after the great anti-Umbrella clone team up were a boat and the cloning/testing/demonstration facility featured in Resident Evil: Retribution.
Saying to a bunch of clones, "Hey, the world is fucked up, want to help me fix it?" demonstrably works. This movie was one with a whole bunch of clones in various flavors and a desperate need for people to help fix the fucked up world. No one considered making use of the clones. Again: what the fuck?
Sunday, June 16, 2013
How not to be a privileged ass: A lazy person's guide
There are activists out there to make the world a better place, this post is not for them. A key component of being an activist is the whole "active" thing. (What happened to the "e" when the ending was added is a story for another time.) This is for the rest of us.
The rest of us is an important group. Without the rest of us doing some small part activists find their work difficult at best. If the rest of us are hideously wrong then activists have to devote their time to correcting the rest of us when it might better be used elsewhere. But even more important than that, the rest of us make up the world in which everyone is forced to live.
Unless someone has got a way to hitch a lift on a passing flying saucer, the rest of us are who they're stuck with. We surround them like water surrounds a fish. We make the world in which they live. The background radiation of social reality is emitted by the rest of us.
That can be used for good or ill. The rest of us can make the world, or at least our corner of it, a space that is safe for all, or we can make it a place where people are afraid to speak their minds or be themselves, a place where people feel constantly beset by incoming fire. A place that one wouldn't want to live but, again barring hitching a lift on flying saucers, everyone has to.
This post is about how to be a good part of the rest of us rather than a bad part of the rest of us while expending minimum effort. There's a reason it says, "lazy person's guide."
As it turns out there is nothing difficult or complex. It requires only two things:
1 Listen.
2 Take into account what you hear when you listen.
That's it.
You have to listen because you don't know everything. Fortunately human beings have adapted a way to deal with this: Language. You may not know what it's like to be a certain type of person, but they can tell you. So, for example, I didn't know that the word, "Lame," was used as a way to describe and insult disabled people. I knew it was used to describe injured horses, chess pieces that can't jump, and uncool things, but I had no idea it was used on people.
There is a reason for that. Not being disabled I don't have to live my life with people constantly throwing insults at me that are based on being disabled. In fact I don't think I've ever been present when such insults were hurled. That's my world, a world where these things don't even pop up on the radar. If it weren't for someone telling me that, yes, that word is used on people and, yes, it is incredibly hurtful to use it as a generic way to say uncool and, yes, it is used as a slur... I would not know these things. I would be blissfully ignorant which is nice, note the "blissful", but leaves me in a position where I can end up hurting people. Because maybe someone who's just been called "lame" 85 times in a vitriol filled rant about how they're an evil asshole mooching off the system to get good parking spaces just walked into the room and maybe, without knowing the varied connotations of the word, I say, "That's so lame," about something I think sucks and the word, "lame," hits them like a punch to the gut.
Sometimes people do go too far, and sometimes the standard repository for all knowledge which contains much that is apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate gets things wrong. The example that comes to mind is, "Brouhaha." It's impossible to be totally certain about anything in the past. Maybe the dinosaurs all had iPads. But insofar as we can be certain "brouhaha" did not originate in antisemitism.
I bring this up mostly because I feel like if I didn't the, perfectly reasonable, objection would form in someone's mind, "But other people can't always be right." No, they can't always. This is a fact of life. But what is true is that for any slur people who it is used against know a hell of a lot more about how often it is used than everyone else.
And it's not just slurs. I started with them for the reason that they're an easy thing to understand. When someone is using a racial, ethnic, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, abilist, [any number of other things] slur it's pretty easy to see that they're in the wrong.
Most prejudice is more subtle and thus much easier to miss when you're not the target. Not being the target, by the way, is part of what privilege is. You don't have to be under fire, you don't have to know anyone is under fire, you don't have to live with the realization that we live in an extremely fucked up world where people are treated like shit just for being who they are. You get to live with blinders and whatever problems may befall you, no matter how severe they might be, you never quite realize how other people have to deal with systemic hurtful bullshit on top of the ordinary problems of life. Except that's not even it, because that skips how ingrained it is. For them systemic hurtful bullshit is part of the ordinary problems of life because it's part of ordinary life period.
Listen to people, listen to what makes them feel safe and unsafe, welcome and unwelcome, so forth.
This might be hard, people might say things about you that you don't want to hear. You may feel yourself going on the defense. You might want to argue, "No, I'm totally not doing X because..." or, "I'm not a Y, I'm insulted that you could even think to say I remind you of a Y." These impulses are perfectly natural, what matters is not that you have them, if you have them, but how you respond to them.
Don't take the defense. Don't say, "I can't possibly be alienating [so-and-so] people because I have a [so-and-so] friend." People who have been here before will instantly know that you have your head up your ass if you take that road. Don't try to argue that people are wrong to feel unsafe or unwelcome. They're not. Their feelings are not yours to dictate. Maybe you can't make them feel safe and welcome, but then that comes down to you accepting that such people will not be safe and welcome in your area, be it your house, your school, your blog, your youtube channel, your club, your circle of friends, your church, your facebook page, your forum, your camping trips, your business, your...
Don't try to argue that you doing X totally should not have produced response Y because [whatever], the issue is not what it should have done, but what it did. Y has happened, the question is what, if anything, you're going to do about it.
Don't try to argue that you're not a [bad thing]. What you are is between you, yourself, your soul if such things exist, and your god if such things exist. For the rest of us what matters isn't what you are but what you do. If the things you do are [bad thing] then it doesn't matter that in your heart of hearts you're not [bad thing], you're still doing [bad thing] things. This also leads us into another thing, by shifting from what you did to what you are you're making it all about you.
If someone says, "You did X and that makes me feel Y," and then you make it all about you and how you feel you're ignoring the other person. You're cutting them out of a conversation about how they feel. Or, in short, you're being an asshole.
If someone says you hurt them the first thing to do is to apologize for hurting them. Even if this is one of the rare cases where you didn't do anything wrong, they still got hurt and you didn't want that so you should have no problem whatsoever with giving a sincere apology.
Next comes asking them how you hurt them so that you won't do it again.
And finally comes self reflection and priorities. I'll talk more about priorities later (I know this because I'm typing out of order right now) but the basic thing is how important it is to you not to hurt them. If it isn't important at all, congratulations: you're an asshole. But there are levels where it might not be your most important priority. Maybe they were hurt because they thought brouhaha was an anti-Semitic slur and you think educating them about the origins of the word not being anti-Semitic is more important than stopping using the word. Depending on the situation this, in itself, even though you're (almost certainly) factually right will still make you an asshole. We'll get to priorities.
This may seem like it's getting long for the lazy person's guide but it's just because I'm using more words than necessary. All of this is still two things only:
1 Listen
2 Take into account what you hear when you listen.
Ok, so, suggestions. In this case unsolicited because I'm going to get into asking for suggestions later but this applies to solicited ones too. Some suggestions you might think are already in force for everyone, if they're being suggested that implies they are not for the group suggesting it. Try harder.
Do not:
1 Take suggestions as personal attacks. ("Go to Hell," can be considered an exception.)
2 Say they won't work without trying.
If you're not going to follow a suggestion then say why, and realize that in so doing you're stating your priorities.
This is where I talk about priorities.
Some people that I respect very much run a forum that is not a safe space because their rules are that anything that is neither spam nor a direct personal attack gets to stay up. Usually this is fine and usually the space is safe. When someone started comparing business tactics to rape it became very clear very fast why this leads to spaces that are not safe.
I talked directly to someone basically in charge of the forum (I'm not totally sure, but I think he shared the highest rank with one other) and he made two things very clear. The first was that he thought what rape metaphor guy was doing was horrible and he intended to oppose it in any way he could short of breaking the rules on which the forum was based. The second was he was not going to oppose the rules on which the forum was based. This was because the rules, to them, were not just arbitrary guideposts for how to deal with a given thing, they were the founding principles on which the entire place was based (I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.)
All speech short of direct personal attacks was sacrosanct there, which meant all other priorities (including making it a safer space by keeping it clear of callous rape metaphors) were secondary.
When you make a decision like that you're ordering your priorities. In that space free speech was a higher priority than avoiding triggering a rape victim who might be reading a thread about copyright and some shenanigans with a game and the company making it. The people who made that determination never thought the question would come up, but when it did they stuck by their own rules and tried to shoot down the rape metaphor person as users rather than administrators.
If people triggered by mentions of rape say that they don't feel safe there, there can be no argument. In that space free speech is considered more important than making such people safe. That's the decision that was made.
I bring up this tangent to point something out, having your space not be safe does not make you evil. Choosing a set of priorities that leaves the space unsafe is not a sign you're demonic. The people who made the forum I just described were good people. If you want to be like them you can be, but you should take something else from it: they were honest about it.
They didn't make any arguments saying, "No, this really is a safe space," or that they were addressing to the needs of those who would be triggered. They didn't push back against those who pointed out it wasn't a safe space. They didn't make a fight of it. They simply said in straightforward terms that they had a certain set of priorities by which they governed and that meant it was not going to be an always safe space. It was going to be an, "As safe as the commenters can make it without using any administrative powers save for direct personal attacks," space which is decidedly not the same thing as a safe space.
If you decide that a space you have control over is going to be run by a set of rules that doesn't result in a safe space, do not argue that it does. Do not argue against those who say it isn't safe. Do not argue at all. Be up front, you have some other guiding principle that's more important to you than making the space safe. Admit it, own it, and leave it at that.
Listening doesn't mean that you have to incorporate everything everyone says, but if you're going to go flatly against it you should at least acknowledge it, probably say why, and do it in such a way that you're not presenting an argument why what the person said was wrong but instead simply stating why you will not be using it.
And that goes for anything, if someone says, "X would make me feel safer/more welcome," and you want to say, "No way I'm doing X," be honest about the fact that your reason for not doing X is more important to you than making the person feel safer/more welcome. (If this should make you feel like you need a shower, reconsider your reason for not doing X.)
Listen and incorporate that into what you do, but sometimes you may incorporate it by saying, "Not gonna do it," rather than incorporating it by doing it. Be aware that this will keep some people away, be aware that (depending on what "it" is) this may make some people think you're an asshole. Do not argue with these people. They've told you what it would take to make them come, they've told you what it would take to make them not think you're an asshole, you've chosen not to do that. Discussion ends there. Leave them the fuck alone; it's their right to leave/think you're an asshole when you're choosing not to meet their needs.
Only you can determine your own priorities, but everyone else gets to determine how they react to your priorities. For whatever it's worth, your priorities might make you an asshole. They might make other people think you're an asshole when you're not. They might do any number of things. Many of those things are good but I'm going for warning here and thus sticking to the bad.
Ask.
Say your group is mostly male, or mostly white, or mostly straight, or mostly straight white males, or mostly whatever and you think it should be more diverse. Ask how you can get a more diverse following. Again:
1 Listen.
2 Take into account what you hear when you listen.
The rest of us is an important group. Without the rest of us doing some small part activists find their work difficult at best. If the rest of us are hideously wrong then activists have to devote their time to correcting the rest of us when it might better be used elsewhere. But even more important than that, the rest of us make up the world in which everyone is forced to live.
Unless someone has got a way to hitch a lift on a passing flying saucer, the rest of us are who they're stuck with. We surround them like water surrounds a fish. We make the world in which they live. The background radiation of social reality is emitted by the rest of us.
That can be used for good or ill. The rest of us can make the world, or at least our corner of it, a space that is safe for all, or we can make it a place where people are afraid to speak their minds or be themselves, a place where people feel constantly beset by incoming fire. A place that one wouldn't want to live but, again barring hitching a lift on flying saucers, everyone has to.
This post is about how to be a good part of the rest of us rather than a bad part of the rest of us while expending minimum effort. There's a reason it says, "lazy person's guide."
As it turns out there is nothing difficult or complex. It requires only two things:
1 Listen.
2 Take into account what you hear when you listen.
That's it.
You have to listen because you don't know everything. Fortunately human beings have adapted a way to deal with this: Language. You may not know what it's like to be a certain type of person, but they can tell you. So, for example, I didn't know that the word, "Lame," was used as a way to describe and insult disabled people. I knew it was used to describe injured horses, chess pieces that can't jump, and uncool things, but I had no idea it was used on people.
There is a reason for that. Not being disabled I don't have to live my life with people constantly throwing insults at me that are based on being disabled. In fact I don't think I've ever been present when such insults were hurled. That's my world, a world where these things don't even pop up on the radar. If it weren't for someone telling me that, yes, that word is used on people and, yes, it is incredibly hurtful to use it as a generic way to say uncool and, yes, it is used as a slur... I would not know these things. I would be blissfully ignorant which is nice, note the "blissful", but leaves me in a position where I can end up hurting people. Because maybe someone who's just been called "lame" 85 times in a vitriol filled rant about how they're an evil asshole mooching off the system to get good parking spaces just walked into the room and maybe, without knowing the varied connotations of the word, I say, "That's so lame," about something I think sucks and the word, "lame," hits them like a punch to the gut.
Sometimes people do go too far, and sometimes the standard repository for all knowledge which contains much that is apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate gets things wrong. The example that comes to mind is, "Brouhaha." It's impossible to be totally certain about anything in the past. Maybe the dinosaurs all had iPads. But insofar as we can be certain "brouhaha" did not originate in antisemitism.
I bring this up mostly because I feel like if I didn't the, perfectly reasonable, objection would form in someone's mind, "But other people can't always be right." No, they can't always. This is a fact of life. But what is true is that for any slur people who it is used against know a hell of a lot more about how often it is used than everyone else.
And it's not just slurs. I started with them for the reason that they're an easy thing to understand. When someone is using a racial, ethnic, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, abilist, [any number of other things] slur it's pretty easy to see that they're in the wrong.
Most prejudice is more subtle and thus much easier to miss when you're not the target. Not being the target, by the way, is part of what privilege is. You don't have to be under fire, you don't have to know anyone is under fire, you don't have to live with the realization that we live in an extremely fucked up world where people are treated like shit just for being who they are. You get to live with blinders and whatever problems may befall you, no matter how severe they might be, you never quite realize how other people have to deal with systemic hurtful bullshit on top of the ordinary problems of life. Except that's not even it, because that skips how ingrained it is. For them systemic hurtful bullshit is part of the ordinary problems of life because it's part of ordinary life period.
Listen to people, listen to what makes them feel safe and unsafe, welcome and unwelcome, so forth.
This might be hard, people might say things about you that you don't want to hear. You may feel yourself going on the defense. You might want to argue, "No, I'm totally not doing X because..." or, "I'm not a Y, I'm insulted that you could even think to say I remind you of a Y." These impulses are perfectly natural, what matters is not that you have them, if you have them, but how you respond to them.
Don't take the defense. Don't say, "I can't possibly be alienating [so-and-so] people because I have a [so-and-so] friend." People who have been here before will instantly know that you have your head up your ass if you take that road. Don't try to argue that people are wrong to feel unsafe or unwelcome. They're not. Their feelings are not yours to dictate. Maybe you can't make them feel safe and welcome, but then that comes down to you accepting that such people will not be safe and welcome in your area, be it your house, your school, your blog, your youtube channel, your club, your circle of friends, your church, your facebook page, your forum, your camping trips, your business, your...
Don't try to argue that you doing X totally should not have produced response Y because [whatever], the issue is not what it should have done, but what it did. Y has happened, the question is what, if anything, you're going to do about it.
Don't try to argue that you're not a [bad thing]. What you are is between you, yourself, your soul if such things exist, and your god if such things exist. For the rest of us what matters isn't what you are but what you do. If the things you do are [bad thing] then it doesn't matter that in your heart of hearts you're not [bad thing], you're still doing [bad thing] things. This also leads us into another thing, by shifting from what you did to what you are you're making it all about you.
If someone says, "You did X and that makes me feel Y," and then you make it all about you and how you feel you're ignoring the other person. You're cutting them out of a conversation about how they feel. Or, in short, you're being an asshole.
If someone says you hurt them the first thing to do is to apologize for hurting them. Even if this is one of the rare cases where you didn't do anything wrong, they still got hurt and you didn't want that so you should have no problem whatsoever with giving a sincere apology.
Next comes asking them how you hurt them so that you won't do it again.
And finally comes self reflection and priorities. I'll talk more about priorities later (I know this because I'm typing out of order right now) but the basic thing is how important it is to you not to hurt them. If it isn't important at all, congratulations: you're an asshole. But there are levels where it might not be your most important priority. Maybe they were hurt because they thought brouhaha was an anti-Semitic slur and you think educating them about the origins of the word not being anti-Semitic is more important than stopping using the word. Depending on the situation this, in itself, even though you're (almost certainly) factually right will still make you an asshole. We'll get to priorities.
This may seem like it's getting long for the lazy person's guide but it's just because I'm using more words than necessary. All of this is still two things only:
1 Listen
2 Take into account what you hear when you listen.
Ok, so, suggestions. In this case unsolicited because I'm going to get into asking for suggestions later but this applies to solicited ones too. Some suggestions you might think are already in force for everyone, if they're being suggested that implies they are not for the group suggesting it. Try harder.
Do not:
1 Take suggestions as personal attacks. ("Go to Hell," can be considered an exception.)
2 Say they won't work without trying.
If you're not going to follow a suggestion then say why, and realize that in so doing you're stating your priorities.
This is where I talk about priorities.
Some people that I respect very much run a forum that is not a safe space because their rules are that anything that is neither spam nor a direct personal attack gets to stay up. Usually this is fine and usually the space is safe. When someone started comparing business tactics to rape it became very clear very fast why this leads to spaces that are not safe.
I talked directly to someone basically in charge of the forum (I'm not totally sure, but I think he shared the highest rank with one other) and he made two things very clear. The first was that he thought what rape metaphor guy was doing was horrible and he intended to oppose it in any way he could short of breaking the rules on which the forum was based. The second was he was not going to oppose the rules on which the forum was based. This was because the rules, to them, were not just arbitrary guideposts for how to deal with a given thing, they were the founding principles on which the entire place was based (I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.)
All speech short of direct personal attacks was sacrosanct there, which meant all other priorities (including making it a safer space by keeping it clear of callous rape metaphors) were secondary.
When you make a decision like that you're ordering your priorities. In that space free speech was a higher priority than avoiding triggering a rape victim who might be reading a thread about copyright and some shenanigans with a game and the company making it. The people who made that determination never thought the question would come up, but when it did they stuck by their own rules and tried to shoot down the rape metaphor person as users rather than administrators.
If people triggered by mentions of rape say that they don't feel safe there, there can be no argument. In that space free speech is considered more important than making such people safe. That's the decision that was made.
I bring up this tangent to point something out, having your space not be safe does not make you evil. Choosing a set of priorities that leaves the space unsafe is not a sign you're demonic. The people who made the forum I just described were good people. If you want to be like them you can be, but you should take something else from it: they were honest about it.
They didn't make any arguments saying, "No, this really is a safe space," or that they were addressing to the needs of those who would be triggered. They didn't push back against those who pointed out it wasn't a safe space. They didn't make a fight of it. They simply said in straightforward terms that they had a certain set of priorities by which they governed and that meant it was not going to be an always safe space. It was going to be an, "As safe as the commenters can make it without using any administrative powers save for direct personal attacks," space which is decidedly not the same thing as a safe space.
If you decide that a space you have control over is going to be run by a set of rules that doesn't result in a safe space, do not argue that it does. Do not argue against those who say it isn't safe. Do not argue at all. Be up front, you have some other guiding principle that's more important to you than making the space safe. Admit it, own it, and leave it at that.
Listening doesn't mean that you have to incorporate everything everyone says, but if you're going to go flatly against it you should at least acknowledge it, probably say why, and do it in such a way that you're not presenting an argument why what the person said was wrong but instead simply stating why you will not be using it.
And that goes for anything, if someone says, "X would make me feel safer/more welcome," and you want to say, "No way I'm doing X," be honest about the fact that your reason for not doing X is more important to you than making the person feel safer/more welcome. (If this should make you feel like you need a shower, reconsider your reason for not doing X.)
Listen and incorporate that into what you do, but sometimes you may incorporate it by saying, "Not gonna do it," rather than incorporating it by doing it. Be aware that this will keep some people away, be aware that (depending on what "it" is) this may make some people think you're an asshole. Do not argue with these people. They've told you what it would take to make them come, they've told you what it would take to make them not think you're an asshole, you've chosen not to do that. Discussion ends there. Leave them the fuck alone; it's their right to leave/think you're an asshole when you're choosing not to meet their needs.
Only you can determine your own priorities, but everyone else gets to determine how they react to your priorities. For whatever it's worth, your priorities might make you an asshole. They might make other people think you're an asshole when you're not. They might do any number of things. Many of those things are good but I'm going for warning here and thus sticking to the bad.
Ask.
Say your group is mostly male, or mostly white, or mostly straight, or mostly straight white males, or mostly whatever and you think it should be more diverse. Ask how you can get a more diverse following. Again:
1 Listen.
2 Take into account what you hear when you listen.
And here's a problem I haven't gotten into before. The people who speak up might take a lot of flack. They might get shouted down. You can't listen to someone who has been shouted down. If someone responds to your request for advice you had better be fucking ready to defend them. You got them to stick their neck out, don't you dare abandon them.
If you're the reason someone is speaking, if they're responding at your request, then you've just grabbed yourself the job of bodyguard until they're no longer speaking at your request. If they start getting personal attacks because of their response to your question it is your job to shoot those attacks down.
You can't just ask and then watch the chaos ensue. You drew these people out so they could say something you wanted to know, you have to protect them from the consequences of doing what you asked. The bigotry that can come out of the woodwork at times like these is stunning and disheartening and you need to make sure it's not silencing the very voices you asked to speak.
There's probably a lot more to that, but I note that for all the words it's still very, very simple. None of it is activism. It's not really very active at all. It doesn't require any more effort than you currently expend.
Listen. If you listen you will learn. If you learn you will be changed. If you are changed that will change how you act. It all starts with listening, which is a very passive thing to do.
If you don't want to be a privileged ass then listen to those who do not share your privilege. Don't just make a show of listening, actually fucking listen. Then, having listened, make use of what you learned.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, the movie
I don't know why, but for some reason I looked up Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra, I was looking for the scene where Picard speaks to the aliens in their language which he finally understands. It is on youtube. As is the Epic of Gilgamesh as told, either half remembered or abridged, by Picard. (Given that the guy he was telling was dying abridgment makes sense.)
It stands as one of the great episodes of The Next Generation.
I say we have an entire movie taking place on a ship in that culture. There could be humans on the ship, a sort of cultural exchange, but they would be in support roles. The movers and the shakers of the ship would be the Children of Tama themselves.
This is a movie that would almost certainly fail to make any money whatsoever, but I would find it fun.
It stands as one of the great episodes of The Next Generation.
I say we have an entire movie taking place on a ship in that culture. There could be humans on the ship, a sort of cultural exchange, but they would be in support roles. The movers and the shakers of the ship would be the Children of Tama themselves.
This is a movie that would almost certainly fail to make any money whatsoever, but I would find it fun.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Probably on account of me not saying anything interesting...
this blog is declining in terms of pageviews (I don't get stats on unique visitors even though that's a more meaningful thing to know.)
So therefore: something interesting.
So therefore: something interesting.
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Actually, what would be interesting to me is some response from the readers. Likes, dislikes, so forth. Specifically what you like or dislike here, but if you'd like to give a full bio I'm not going to stop you.
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