*grumble*

As I’ve pointed out numerous times in this log and its previous iterations, I have a tumultuous love/hate relationship with people in general. Well, more of a grudingly acceptant/hate relationship, anyway: my regard for people ebbs and flows from neutral live-and-let-live to searing red hatred, and back again.

It really sucks, because the latter seems to be the default position I take. Always has been. I find all sorts of new ways to be irritated by seemingly innocuous things. Lately, it’s been politics. Okay, so no one actually likes politics, I get that, but some of us kinda get stuck following them. And those of us who do, we have to take a side. Plenty of people will claim to stand in the middle, but I don’t buy it. There’s no middle ground, only shades of grey. They aren’t the same thing.

Lately, however, I’ve been finding myself becoming more annoyed with people on my own side of the ideological spectrum. I mean, it’s incredibly easy to become incensed with the cartoonish evil espoused and practiced by the opposition, but the sheer naïveté, the stupid, doe-eyed idealism coming from my side is just so trite and cloying that I want to vomit. These people are being emotionally manipulated and actually believing the crap that their leaders say, when there has not been a shred of evidence that these leaders actually intend to follow through on the things they promise us. The president gives us another bullshit platitude intended to pacify the True Believers™, and everyone’s getting all verklempt and scarfing it all down like mom’s apple pie. I guess our country really is going to hell, and I think we are all to blame, for one reason or another.

Or maybe this is just another way my mind is trying to rationalize to me that I should get the hell away from facebook for a while. I dunno. Ugh.

[editor's note: this is really only half of a rant, i just don't feel like writing the other half because ho-hum who cares]

 

it’s getting real in here

Been a while since I last posted in here; there is some important stuff going on in my world now: we found out a few days ago that we’re having a daughter. So now we have just a few more months before we can finally say hello to Evelyn Mirabelle, and I can’t wait.

Of course, this brings on new complications, that being the current state of things here. Women are being relegated to second-class status (well, more so than in recent years, anyway), as misogyny is becoming more rampant and abjectly blatant, everywhere. From suppression of women’s rights to name-calling to stereotyping, I worry about what things will be like in Evie’s future. I can only hope that this isn’t going to be a long-lasting trend and we end up going back to the fifties like some people seriously want.

I want Evie to grow up knowing that she can do whatever and be whatever she is capable of doing and being, and that I don’t want her to be stuck living a lifestyle she didn’t want to live, that will ultimately lead to a lifetime of resentment. If she wants to be a doctor or a soldier, a rockstar or an accountant, a monster truck driver or a monster hunter, it’s all good to me. As long as it makes her happy.

We’re going to introduce all kinds of things in her life as learning opportunities. She will not fear the things girls are ‘supposed’ to fear, like spiders and reptiles and rats. She’ll learn the scientific method and how to lead her math class. If she wants to be an artist, good for her, she’ll be taking after a great one in her mother. If Eva is ever interested in music, I’ll support her in that. I’ll encourage her in anything she chooses, but I won’t burn her out on it, that’s how dreams are ruined and how pastimes become prisons.

But I want her to be free to do any of these things, in the sense that she won’t be dragged down by the expectations and stereotypes often projected onto women. Eva should be able to start a family on her own terms, and she should be able to provide for it and stand on her own if something goes wrong. Nothing should stand in her way like it does now for women. Her character and abilities shouldn’t be devalued just because she is female, she shouldn’t have to stand being called certain derogatory names just for expressing an opinion while being a female.

The problem is, this isn’t all coming from men. There are plenty of women out there who behave just as much in this way, either because they were brought up in a highly patriarchal background, or they pick it up from the women in their lives, be they peers or role models. It looks to me as though women suffer from a deflated self-image based solely on their gender, and it’s sad. I even see it in Jen, and while I know she recognizes it, I can only hope she knows that she can beat it, because she cannot pass it down to Eva. This sort of thinking could undo any positive values we try to instill in her, and it’s a real problem. Not with any one individual, but with our society as a whole.

 

my left ear

Back in 2009, I wrote in a blog post long lost to the æther of Web 2.0 that I was removing my eyebrow piercing (oh, by the way, I had an eyebrow piercing). As I’d illustrated back then, the piece of metal was, to me, part of the adolescence I felt I never had; thus, removing it was a symbolic gesture of saying goodbye to a part of my youth. I’d done this because I was finished with my bachelor’s degree. Here I am, roughly two years later, making a similar gesture with the piercing in the helix of my left ear. On Tuesday, I defended my candidacy exam and am now formally enrolled in the PhD program here. I had already planned to take the piercing out once I’d completed that milestone. The last one, the conch of my right ear, will come out when I defend my dissertation.

The defense wasn’t anything like I had expected. I’d spent the best part of the night before going through flights of panic; not full-blown panic attacks, mind you, but short bursts like miniature attacks. I didn’t get to sleep until roughly 4am, and I was up just a few hours later. Naturally, being in a state of allostatic overload, I had to resort to my knee-jerk coping mechanism: nasty, acidic self-deprecation and black humor. I won’t delve into the things running through my mind at the time, but despite having gone through treatment for my illnesses, I can still become really negative under periods of intense stress. I never said it was a good coping mechanism, okay?

Anyway, the meeting itself was no big deal. My guidance committee simply discussed with me that I need to be more focused in writing my grant proposals. I had a lot of great ideas, and had obviously done my research, they said, but I need to just settle on one or two things and dig deeper into those. Then the only really trying part of the defense was when they asked me to demonstrate how I’d design an experiment I’d be interested in doing. That was it. It really was, as my mentor and friend, Veronica had told me, just a hazing ritual that the professors put their students through.

The thing is, I’ve always been weary of events like this. At the infernal Art Institute, evaluations consisted of constant criticism, for only the sake of criticism. Nothing positive was ever spoken, we were never given advice on how to play to our strengths because we were never told what our strengths were, let alone that we had any in the first place. We never really discussed projects with our teachers, all we ever got were deadlines and lectures about how we basically would never make it in ‘the industry’. The real world after that was largely the same thing. No recognition for work done well, constant scrutiny and derision for any slip-ups. I never realized, before this point, that the purpose of a guidance committee is to, well, guide, to help us keep from setting ourselves up to fail, instead of pushing us along that path themselves. And once, again, I need to understand that I can succeed at my goals, and that I should be confident in how I present myself, because I have a reason to be.

So now I move forward.

It’s just strange to me, I never felt like I’ve really actually grown up. Nothing has ever turned out to be as dire and urgent as everyone makes it out to be. Don’t get me wrong, life isn’t exactly a play date in the sandbox, but it’s not a daily trudge through grey murk with people to beat you down at every turn either. I’ve never really viewed anything as being so serious that it requires a long search through my soul — I mean, hell, this university thing was literally decided on a whim, because I couldn’t buy an old Toyota Van that I’d wanted… yes, it’s a bit more serious than that, but really now, it’s not that big a deal. And here I am, going to be a father in just over five more months, and I don’t feel the panic that all fathers-to-be are supposed to feel. There’s not an iota of nervousness here. And despite being thirty now, I can’t believe that I even left my teens. There is responsibility, sure, but it hasn’t worn me down one bit. I don’t know why I feel this way, everyone else is well on their way in their journeys through banal adulthood.

Maybe this ritual of removing bits of metal from my head isn’t so much about leaving my youth behind, but about realizing that I don’t need that stuff to keep me from feeling like I’m getting old.

 

i’m rubbish at titling these things

The burrito apparently takes after Jen in terms of energy. Yesterday, Jen went for testing for certain things (Downs and stuff) and got a second ultrasound. Our kid was all over the place, doing backflips and stuff. I wish I could have seen it, but nooooo, I had to be at work. Oh well, next time. What I think is really starting to jump on me is the idea that, in a few years, we’re going to have someone in our home to interact with, to talk to every day. After twelve years of it being just Jen and me, it’s a little strange. Not in a bad way, just a concept that seems so foreign to me. And then when we have a teenager, well, I don’t even know how to comprehend that.

Then, there’s work. Ugh. I really don’t want to be there this week. After that grant proposal, I’d prefer to hibernate for the rest of the month, and I really don’t want anything more to do with that thing I wrote. Awful, the whole experience. I mean, I know it’s something I’m going to have to do in the future, and I know I’ll get better at it with experience, but right now, the pressure is murderous. I hate feeling like this, it’s panic time all over again. I want it to be over right now so I can live my life.

Anyway.

Moving is hitting some snags right now. Well, not moving, per se, but with utilities. Stupid electric company won’t process my service request, so I have to call them. And AT&T apparently doesn’t cover our upcoming apartment building, you know, the one in the same dman apartment complex? So I have to find an alternative. Unfortunately, that leaves us with few choices, so I think we’re stuck with Time Warner Cable this time.

In geek news: I’m going to try out some child-oriented Ubuntu distros for when the burrito is ready to learn to read. First, there’s Qimo, an lightweight XFCE-based OS directed at really little kids (~3). It has a bunch of applications for reading, math, drawing, and even basic programming, and there are plenty more to download as well. I figure that it would be more useful than a LeapFrog or whatever. And when the sprout sprouts a bit, there’s Edubuntu, a free educational OS that is trying to find a place in schools already (which would be nice, it would save a ton of money, what with all the free open-source software), and is a place for learning things a bit more complex. I think I’m doing this because I need something to do, and I haven’t built a computer in a long time, not since I ditched Windows.

Welp, that’s about it.

 

been a while

Oy, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. I had my PhD candidacy thing to do, which consisted of writing a mock grant proposal. I decided to do mine on the physiological effects of prenatal stress on offspring, throughout the lifespan. Pretty much all of the literature out there covers the effects of stress on adulthood, but not on early life through adolescence. Problem is, though, I get super anxious, to the point where I’m just paralyzed with fear. Because of that, I didn’t work on it as much as I would have liked. I just hope that it didn’t suffer too much from that.

We went to IKEA this past Saturday to get some stuff for the new apartment (oh, yeah, we’re moving so we’ll have more room for the kid); we got a crib, a changing table, and a shelf unit for the nursery, as well as a desk and some other stuff. I can’t wait to move, for many reasons, really.

Hunger has been the major issue of late for Jen and the pregnancy. I read somewhere that if a woman finds herself needing to consume more during pregnancy, she may be carrying a boy. So there’s that. We might be having a son, but nothing’s certain until the ultrasound says so.

Welp, now that I’m done with the writing part of my grant proposal, I don’t really know what else to do with myself. I’ve already updated my blog (well, I will update, technically), but what else? I want to get to understand Linux more, but I’ve been leery of my computer’s behavior lately; I could read, but it’s getting too late to read tonight. Ugh. Whatever :\

 

stop child pornography at reddit [UPDATE]

UPDATE: As many of you know, as a result of this campaign started on the SomethingAwful forums, Reddit has [reluctantly] banned linking of child pornography and shut down many subreddits where offending material could be found. Today, I received a message from Susan Visscher of Newsy, asking if I could embed this video from her site, offering more information on the matter.

Newsy – Reddit Bans Child Pornography
[unfortunately, I can't embed videos on this blog because I am a poor grad student with a kid on the way]

[editor's note: links to offending subreddits have been cut, only the lists remain]
reddit is a social website that allows its users to share links to content on the internet and post comments about the links. This enables not only the sharing of content (photographs, videos, websites, and so on) but also the discussion of said content.

reddit is massively popular, especially with young people.

reddit is split into subcommunities known as “subreddits”, meaning that while reddit exists as a website, it consists as the sum of its subcommunities that people can subscribe to and participate in by means of sharing and commenting as aforementioned.

Unfortunately, the reddit community as a whole also harbors pedophiles and distributors of child pornography, including a man who goes by the name Tessorro and runs a subreddit called ‘preteen girls’

The main purveyor of child porn on reddit is Violentacrez, who was the former leader of the “jailbait” subreddit, before Anderson Cooper’s report got it shut down.

A list of Jailbait (underage porn) forums which have sprung up to replace it: (ALL BELOW LINKS ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE)

• truejailbait
• gaolbait
• GirlsinSchoolUniforms
• LegalTeens
• n***erjailbait
• Thenewjailbait
• RealGirls
• trapbait

/r/jailbait is shut down now, but the traffic statistics posted by Violentacrez from its heydays are interesting. The dip in mid August is when admins temporarily closed the subreddit, and the spike on September 30th is when Anderson Cooper talked about it. The numbers after the temporary shut down are abnormally low, as would be expected. But prior to that, they were getting about 30,000 unique visitors each day.

The owners of reddit know there is active trading of child porn on their forums, and refuse to do anything about it. Further, Reddit’s cofounder simply dismisses the issue and blames the exploited children whose pictures are being traded.

The inaction of reddit’s administrators has been a frequent topic, part of that being Violentacrez’s shockingly close relationship with them. Violentacrez’s Twitter account seems like a good example of this. Krispycrackers (head of advertising and the community helpline at reddit), Hueypriest (reddit’s general manager), and Chromakode (developer) all follow violentacrez. So does Jedberg (former administrator), KeyserSosa (former lead developer) and MikeSchitraldi (another former developer type).

If you view their past tweets, you’ll see that Violentacrez has regularly been in direct, public contact with them.

In 2008, r/jailbait received the most votes in reddit’s “Best Community” contest, with SuicideWatch taking a distant second, receiving about half as many votes.

Another interesting fact is that Violentacrez has the third highest amount of karma on all of reddit for submitted links. Reddit can’t get enough of the guy.

Are you sick to your stomach yet? The list of child pornography subreddits continues: (all links below are not safe for viewing)

• “Preteen Girls”
• “Male Jailbait”
• “Jailbait Junkies”
• “Asian Jailbait”
• “Young Porn”

Other awful Reddit things:

• A Pedophile’s Confession
• A section called “Raping Women”
• “Beating Women”
• “Lolicon” (cartoon drawings of naked children)
• “Pics of Dead Kids”

What do we do with this?

The biggest, most important thing I can think of that you can do with the “Redditbomb”:

Reddit is hugely popular with people under 18, right? And Anderson Cooper may not revisit the story, the FBI may do nothing, gloom and doom, right?

Act Local. If you’re in America, I bet there’s 20 churches near your home. Each church could have around 100 CONCERNED PARENTS that go to PTA meetings and talk to other parents. Send the “Redditbomb” to local politicians and churches. Let them see that their children are using a website that exploits and sexualizes children.

You can send tips to the FBI all day (god knows I do), but I think a grassroots campaign could do wonders.

I think the smaller we start, the bigger it gets. Barely anyone remembers the Anderson Cooper story. But if a bunch of smalltown moms went on a crusade against a website that wants their precious angel to strip for their gross pleasure?

Do you know how BORING local news is? Can you imagine if your local news could run a “IS YOUR CHILD POSTING IN A PEDOPHILE WEBSITE? STATISTICALLY THERE’S AN 80% CHANCE!” story? They’d moisten their undies when they open the Redditbomb in their email.

Welcome to PEDOGEDDON 2: The PEDOPOCALYPSE

Redditbomb distribution list

TV News

• ABC
• CBS
• NBC
• CNN
• FOX
• MSNBC
• Al Jazeera
• BBC

Newspapers

• NY Times, NY Post (love salacious/scandalous shit)
• WSJ
• LA Times
• SF Chronicle, Bee
• Washington Post
• Indianapolis Star
• Atlanta Journal Constitution
• Chicago Sun Times
• everything here

• Churches, PTAs, Schools: Act Local send it to nearby high schools and churches. If you’re in America, there’s easily 20 churches near your home. Each church will have 30 to several thousand parents that go to PTA meetings and talk to other parents. Send the “Redditbomb” to local politicians schools and churches. Let them see that their children are using a website that exploits and sexualizes children, requesting that children submit their own nude photos.

• Most importantly, Local News – Local News Stations -Your local paper
• Government Officials -Your Senator -Your Representative -State Legislators -Governor
• Cops -FBI -Your local and state police departments
• Bloggers and Political Websites -Political bloggers of all stripes (dKos, Digby, Freep, etc) -Mommybloggers -Matt Drudge will love this shit -Huffington Post -Stephen Colbert -The Daily Show -Rachel Maddow

 

cat’s out of the bag…

…but the burrito’s still in the microwave. It was nice finally to be able to quit with all the sneaking around nonsense with the kid, especially telling the parents about it all. I think Jamey is even more excited than they are though, which is pretty sweet, I’m glad things are cool with us now. Of course, as Jen and I hoped, things would get better within the family with this announcement, and it looks pretty good so far.

At least within my side of the family, anyway. Naturally, Jen’s family doesn’t seem to be all that enthused; all we got from them was an indirect Facebook comment from sister-in-law Beth about how she is going to be an aunt again (!!!), yet no mention of names, confusing even her sister’s husband, a new father himself. She has yet to say anything to Jen herself, so basically it’s, as always, all about Beth. Naturally. Even more disappointing irritating is that her brother Jeremy hasn’t even acknowledged it at all. Now I’d expect that from her brow-beating, self-centered bastard of a father (complete with behind-the-back trash-talk), but wow, that’s cold. Now I’m not even sure if I should feel bad about having lost any respect for him.

Wow, way to turn a happy event into bile again, me. Real pro tactics there.

 

project country dinosaurs is officially go

…because we now have photographic proof!

It’s still really weird telling myself that that is my son or daughter right there, and that I am a dad. Really weird.

Anyway, the due date is 29 August, so it should a hell of a Labor Day weekend, right?

Earlier posts:
Les Enfants Terribles
Announcement
[generic_post]

 

post for thursday, 5 january 2012

[note: I couldn't think of a title. Deal with it.]

It’s funny. As recent as a year ago, I was vehemently against the very idea of having children; my psychological problems raise a huge glowing red flag, Jen’s health issues are nothing I’d wish on my, well, second worst enemy (I hate my cousin that much), and neither of us wanted to continue our family bloodlines for so many reasons.

Yet here I am today, Jen is six weeks into Project Country Dinosaurs, and while it doesn’t show outwardly (I was and will probably always be rubbish as expressing emotions), I’m getting all giddy and impatient inside, wishing we could just go into hibernate mode until about March or April so we can know what we’re having already. Like I’m seriously looking forward to this just about more than anything before. It’s crazy.

It does kind of suck though, not really having anyone to talk to about it. I’m not going to get into that though.

There is another problem I’m having. Since the beginning of all of this, I’ve wanted to start a blog to present to [Evie/Ira] on her/his fourth or fifth birthday, detailing who we are, our backgrounds, stuff from our own childhoods, things we went through together before all this began, and so on. I don’t know my parents all that well even though they’re still in my life, it’s just difficult for me to approach them and talk about it, our family dynamic is just so awkward. So I don’t want it to be like that for my own children. Aaaaaanyway, the problem is, I don’t know where to begin. No idea. Should I start with the present, write about the things that are going on right now as the baby is developing; should I start with stories of my childhood, or what life was like in general when I was four or five? And what about the not-so-happy stuff? I can’t exactly sweep it under the rug, but I don’t want to darken a little kid’s day with it. [Maybe make it hidden until the 'right' time?] It’s a daunting task, once you get right down to it.

And that’s why it sucks not to have people to talk to about it. Can’t really get any input on the subject at all. Oh well, only seven-and-a-half more months to go, roughly, gotta get to it sometime.

 

*puke*

Ugh, I’ve been feeling really sluggish and rather ill lately. I dunno, it feels like I’m going to be sick soon, I don’t know if it’s nerves (due to the PhD program qualification assignment I have to complete this semester) or if I really am just getting sick or what. I’m going to try to have a go at running again today but I don’t know if I can do it. Either way, I’m not looking forward to it, while simultaneously hoping I can manage. I was doing so well for a while, running 4 to 4.5 miles every other day or so at a 10min/mile pace; now I can barely run a 5k if I can make the attempt in the first place.

In other news: I had this rather awful dream that I was in art school again (that’s actually a first *shudder*), and I had this assignment that I had to complete. I didn’t get anywhere with it because I didn’t think I could pull it off, like I didn’t have the skill or capacity to do it. The rest of the people in the class either had no talent and their projects were terrible, or if they did have talent, they got the assignment completely wrong, so it stands to reason that I should have been able to complete it and still be okay, but I just didn’t have any confidence in myself to do it. Does this mean anything? I couldn’t tell you. It sure sounds like it, but I don’t really get into dream interpretation. Nonetheless, it is somewhat compelling.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to walk off this nauseous dizzy sensation I’m feeling. Not much hope in it, I’m afraid, but it doesn’t hurt to try, right?