T r a n s m i s s i o n & a L i v e W i r e
Nov. 12th, 2009
04:55 pm - Political update
As passionately pro-choice as I am, I really dislike this take on abortion rights. It ignores the serious ethical and metaphysical disagreements that lie beneath the policy difference, and paints all anti-choicers as paternalistic buffoons. Not only does that make it inaccurate, it also harms the abortion rights cause. The only way we win is by convincing people that abortion is not morally equivalent to murder and women who seek to terminate a pregnancy are not selfish sluts who should have kept their legs closed. Hard to draw folks to your way of thinking when you're making it clear that you don't understand their position. And since we're down to just about half of Americans supporting abortion rights, we've got a lot of work to do. Mind you, I have no idea how to change people's minds about this. I'd just like it if we weren't shooting ourselves in the foot, at a bare minimum.
Also, you may have noticed that I haven't written anything about health care reform. There's a simple explanation for that: I don't understand it. I know I'm not philosophically opposed to government-funded health care, and I have seen persuasive evidence that the current plan will save the country money in the long run, but I'm suspicious of clunky public-private hybrids that try to appeal to the American center's confused and contradictory ideas about capitalism and socialism. I always worry that first-term Presidents are trying to score points rather than pass legislation that actually works. And at the end of the day, I just don't know that much about health insurance, exchanges, credits ... ugh, my eyes glaze over. I found the credit crunch fascinating and loved researching the bizarre financial instruments that got us into that mess, but this is totally opaque to me.
Nov. 1st, 2009
01:08 am - Hallow's end
Despite my devastating brokeness and stunningly low energy, I had a Halloween this year!
Me and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
punslinger as Dead Saloon Girl and Dead Cow Rustler. I wish you could see my gunshot wound. It came out quite well considering that it was eyeshadow and lipstick on my forehead. We tore it up at the local karaoke dive. 
My first experiment with shaded pumpkin carving. For the folks who don't play WoW, it is a portrait of Murky the baby Murloc, the most adorable pet in the game which I will tragically never possess.
Darling Boyfriend stayed home to study and possibly hand out candy, but apparently no one trick-or-treated in our apartment complex. More Butterfingers for us!
Oct. 30th, 2009
01:09 am - Fanmix: Keep Your Eyes on the Horizon
For ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
polybigbang: "Keep Your Eyes on the Horizon," tacky_tramp's first-ever fanmix! Inspired by dramaqueen469's lovely Supernatural fic My Heart Would Feel to Be a Crime (unless it trembled with the strings).
01 Carbon - Tori Amos
01 This Modern Love - Bloc Party
03 Give In - The Bravery
04 Outsiders - Franz Ferdinand
05 Hey Pretty - Poe
06 Time Out from the World - Goldfrapp
07 The Four of Us are Dying - Nine Inch Nails
08 A Stroke of Luck - Garbage
09 You Are - Pearl Jam
10 Invincible - Muse
Download here!
Oct. 27th, 2009
10:11 am - WriSoMiFu
I did NaNo a couple years ago, and predictably petered out after about a week. This year, I will be doing wrisomifu instead. That's "Write Something, You Miserable Fuck," wherein participants commit to sit down and write for 10 minutes every day. I will probably go for a gold star and make it 30.
The community's userinfo includes this quotation, which I feel perfectly encapsulates my chief struggle with writing:
"You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work." William Gibson
Oct. 26th, 2009
04:16 pm - /ignore
This is a World of Warcraft post, except where it's really not about WoW and is instead about hatred and oppression and the compromises we do or do not make in order to have fun.
English-speaking MMO culture is predominately white, heterosexual, cisgender, and male. It's also On The Internet, which means that the usual social constraints on our behavior don't have quite the strength they do in face-to-face interactions. (See: Gabe's Internet Dickwad Theory.) Gather a bunch of white straight cis men together on the internet, and it means that racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia will run rampant. Which means MMO players of color, female MMO players, trans MMO players, and queer MMO players eventually encounter hatred and oppression in a space that is supposed to be fun.
The stakes are, arguably, lower in an MMO. Another player can call me a faggot or a dyke or a dumb cunt, but s/he cannot easily escalate that into physical violence against me. Players can discuss how lazy Mexicans are ruining the U.S., but they can't actually take jobs and resources away from Chicano/as right then and there. That doesn't mean it isn't painful. It can still take its toll. It reminds us that people hate us, and even if they won't say it to our faces, they'll let loose as soon as they think they can get away with it.
That's the hardest part for me. My social circle has been pretty limited for a while now. I surround myself with people who are not hateful and who do not throw slurs around and who (including myself) certainly slip into some of the subtler forms of oppression from time to time but will nonetheless discuss that with an open mind. I live in California, which means that when I have a job, I and my colleagues are protected by fairly strong harassment laws. Even if my coworkers are thinking shitty, hateful, oppressive things, they generally do not voice them in the workplace because the boss has told them not to lest the company be sued and they be fired. The LJ communities I read tend to be progressive enough that explicitly oppressive language is forbidden and subtle attitudes can be discussed with support. And then I log into WoW, and it's a free for all.
And I have to decide what the fuck to do about it.
Okay, yeah, technically using slurs is against the Terms of Service. So I suppose I could report someone to a Game Master. Which means in about three days, when a GM finally gets to the ticket, the offending asshole MIGHT get a very brief suspension from the game. Or maybe not, because the GM didn't think my documentation was adequate. I can /ignore the jerk, which means I'll never see anything that character types again, but what if the jerk is in my guild? What if the guild leader doesn't think it's a big deal? Now I have to quit my guild, which might be full of non-jerk people I actually quite like, and I have to try to find a new guild, one without jerks, which may or may not exist and which may or may not want me as a member. I may lose access to content I enjoy (because, for the non-MMO players out there, some content is only accessible to decently organized and reasonably competent groups of players). Maybe I'll find a guild that will take me, but they're on another server, so I have to spend $25 to transfer my character over there. So what the fuck, now I'm spending money because someone else is an asshole and I just want to raid? Will Blizzard refund the cost of a server transfer in a case like that? I'm thinking no.
And all of those options are the least confrontational ones. Reporting, /ignoring, /gquitting -- that does nothing to help anyone else. I should confront the person and make it clear that this behavior is not okay, right? If I speak up publicly, other targeted people might feel a little safer and a little happier. On the other hand, other assholes will be listening too, and they'll probably jump in and make a big You're Too Sensitive, Bitch dogpile. Probably with a side order of Stop Attention-Whoring and Shut the Fuck Up. And again, this is a fucking game, something I do to relax, and I don't want to deal with any more hatred than I have to.
Me, I have it pretty good. My first WoW guild was run by two gay guys and I don't recall ever seeing slurs in the guild chat channel; people would say mildly sexist things sometimes, but I could shoot them down pretty easily and not get shit on in response. Only one guy ever called things "gay" to describe them as stupid, bad, or undesirable. My current guild doesn't have any of that nonsense so far. (Though I know we fail in other ways. "Retard" gets said constantly.) And the global chat channels aren't unbearable on my server, considering the stuff people encounter elsewhere. I started what seems to be the only formally GLBT-friendly guild on the server with one of my less-played characters; it has four members so far, woo hoo, and the recruiting thread on the official forums only got trolled a little.
But I still hate that moment when I see someone saying something awful, and I have to make that decision. I'm fairly comfortable with confrontation in face-to-face interactions. Why am I so squeamish about confrontations in WoW? I guess I feel desperately outnumbered and afraid of social consequences. If only the tables were turned and the assholes felt this way.
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