Just Like Run DMC said...

The line isn't blurred. Sex and really, all intimate physical contact requires consent. And sure, much of this consent can often take a non-verbal form. But I am not really qualified to expound the details of this consent, I would simply say - if in doubt, don't. And if you've ever been accused of sexual harassment, try doubting.

Now, beyond the line, there is a hazy terrain called flirtation, and I would argue is problematic. At the very least, tricky like Run DMC said.

A friend of mine tagged me on facebook soliciting my comment on a news article from some tech news site type thing. fb no longer seems to have an easy way to navigate through old posts so I couldn't really trawl it up for yall. But the article wasn't that interesting, just another iteration of what Chris Rock called 'dumb guys trying to get laid' I think in the same bit Chris Rock defined sexual harassment as 'sleep with me or I'll fire you' and the rest just dumb guys trying to get laid. I'm sure the law and most of society would at this stage of the game reject Rock's definition, and furthermore. Being no longer a business person, I can now say with luxurious ease, is that I would fire an employee for being a dumb guy trying to get laid.

Which is what happened in the article, a dumb guy commented on a lady's linked in profile pick when she solicited an 'endorsement' or whatever it is and he was like 'sweet cakes' and worse. She went to the press, guy got fired.

That ain't interesting, nor may I ad, incorrect in any way. As my old Director used to say to his sales reps on the issue of accepting gifts 'think how it would look in the papers' which I actually think in the absence of a robust moral compass and sense of professionalism, is a good test for us mortals to question our own judgement - how would this look in the public sphere?

Same same if you accidently cc'd all on a steamy email you wrote to a colleague.

What I do want to comment on is a comment that was made by my fb friends' fb friend who wasn't solicited for a comment. He said, and I paraphrase 'it's because this dumb guy was an old dumb guy, if he was a young handsome guy there'd be no issue.'

For the record, I submitted to the record, the observation that commenting on somebodies reproductive value is never professional (unless you work in the adult industries I guess, but it's not like that industry isn't riddled with a lot of problems beyond professionalism).

What I did have to concede, is that the same behaviors can illicit different responses depending who they are coming from. But because some people can get away with murder, and others don't doesn't make it okay for those who can to do it. Know what I'm saying.

Enter flirtation, a largish smallish part of the spectrum of interaction between people's of all gender identities and orientations. From the conscious and calculated to the subconscious and involuntary. It's both enjoyable, but can lead to trouble and it is tricky even when you are a natural at it.

I flirt with far more people than I ever intend or even desire to be physically intimate with to any degree. I imagine I am not alone, part of this is that walk or sit long enough in any public place, I hear people trying to decipher the meanings of behaviors of somebody they probably flirt with.

I don't wish to delve at all into the impact of technology, text based communications and constant access to communication channels has done. I have listened to Aziz Ansari's book 'Modern Romance' and it gives a good coverage of much of that shit.

But I don't think these conversations between people about whether other people are into them or not is new. At the very least not as new as the adoption of the internet. Getting fired for sexual harassment is perhaps newer, and actually choosing a partner is probably the new thing that started to spark these conversations.

Maybe contraception? When the Marriage market and Sex Market divided, empowering men in the marriage market to a far greater extent than the gains women made in the Sex Market.

Anyway, I've sidetracked quite a bit. There's a simple solution to sexual harassment in the workplace, and that is a zero-tolerance policy. A hard, sharp, distinct line. Which makes things like somebody writing in electronic form their harassment to you - an easy problem to dispense with. Conceivably even with IM services it's as simple as grabbing a screen print. I don't use LinkedIn but with the cost of data storage way down, I don't know too many IM platforms that don't archive conversations anyway.

Slightly trickier when you are cornered in the break room or copy room with no body around, for a he-said-she-said debate over 'serious allegations' but I've heard enough stories now to be assured that the future promises more managers of moral courage to actually take a complainants word and dismiss an employee for their unacceptable behavior. I doubt though this is the norm yet.

This is an ideal solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace, and this would also have I believe an actual powerful effect on the culture of sexual harassment outside of the office. The culture would bring the message home, it'd get taught in schools and so on.

This then though, creates problems for desirable flirtation, which I will simply describe as the flirtation that occurs in the presence of reciprocal (though not necessarily exclusive) attraction.

Though I won't be ageist, here that random fb friend of a fb friend made a in part valid observation. We tolerate or even welcome a set of behaviors from people we find attractive that we don't from anyone else. I would assume it follows a spectrum, and if you consider the very idea of a 'relationship' this observation becomes obvious - albeit formalised.

A relationship between two or more consenting adults consists entirely of privileged behavior towards one another. That's what a relationship is.

I'm not an expert, I'm not sure what the actual expertise is - social anthropology, evolutionary psychology...? But I will assert here that flirtation is at least in part, preamble to physical intimacy. A fact finding, data gathering phase for two people to gain the confidence to actually overtly approach each other.

How much confidence? Depends on the context, a platform like tinder or a singles bar in the physical world require a lower threshold of confidence because there's a tacit assumption that there's a reason to be in these consequences. At work, particularly with a zero tolerance of sexual harassment in place, you'd need to be extremely confident.

Here though, it gets tricky and cruel. I can only testify to heteronormative relationships, and unforch, most data and research on sexual interaction and behavior is heteronormative too. Making it hard for me to find out 2nd hand with any confidence.

But I was progressive, but after learning a bunch about body language, actually conceded to old-fashioned thinking. It falls to men to take the risk of asking outright for a date (or whatever) simply because the subconscious cues are skewed to make an attuned male much more confident than an attuned woman to the reverse.

It is oft reported women's body language gives some 50 cues that they are attracted. Men are reported to have 10. A few I can vouch for is the torso orientation (or honest feet) they will be oriented towards the woman they like even from a distance and even while engaged in conversation with others. Jealousy also, but I would have to say is a perilous one to test. Jealousy can drive a guy really stupid and is really not the most flattering way a guy can betray his affection.

Whereas women provide a wealth of data with which you can build a constellation of confidence. You really only have to discount contexts where it might be somebodies job to butter you up a little - like a retail assistant.

Even so, asking someone out is never not a risk. Someone may betray that they find you attractive, this does not mean their conscious mind is on board, and doesn't have any pull. People for example are pretty resilient (despite angry rants on the internet) to cheat on their partners. And they can be quite pragmatic too about getting involved with certain people, much as they want to because of complications or conflicts that may arise.

But while I do think it at the very least natural, that men assume the risk of approaching women (risk of rejection) this starts to clash with the statistic that men (I assume) are the primary instigators of sexual harassment.

Drop in a zero-tolerance policy that is effective in stamping out sexual harassment, you will reduce approaches by men to only those emotionally competent enough to know and intuit when the attraction is reciprocated, and reciprocated in that way - and that is I suspect, a minority.

I would expect that the men who do best, simply in this domain are the most risk seeking ie. they don't feel the hurt of rejection to any extent they really care about. I would suspect those men good at reading the emotions on another persons face do next as well but for different reasons, and I would speculate that they may not even correlate.

(My speculation is thus, that the men/women who feel the least aversion to the risk of rejection do so not in most cases by higher order thinking and rationalization, but because they do not invest much of themselves in each solicitation. It is not important what that person thinks of them, they just think it would be fun to go on a date or have sex. Conversely people who are good at reading the emotions on other people's faces are for reasons I can't really justify the same kind of people who discriminate to a higher degree the people they want in their lives, and also form attachments easier, ratcheting up their investment in their potential partners.)

What's cruel is that the adoption of a zero-tolerance sexual harassment approach (society wide, and an actual functional one - as in practiced, not just preached) to me necessitates that women start approaching men, as in initiating the formal recognition of a relationship, not just being more overt in their flirtations.

And that is cruel, because though women are I'm told, proven to be better at reading the emotions on other people's faces, men simply give off less signs that they are attracted to somebody. As in to a greater degree, when women ask out men, they may be not just uncertain, but blind. The fallback may be observing that men are much more up for sex (even with a stranger) than women are, so they are likely to say yes even in the absence of a previously felt attraction.

But women that have asked me out have reported that the act is terrifying, and that having to do so, sucks. Most of us I feel would naturally prefer to recieve an offer that we are free to accept or reject, even if this preference left us culturally deciders rather than choosers.

Currently though, all of us can choose who to flirt with. Personally, I do think that men should remove the dimension of touch from their flirtation. I feel that is the hotbed of sexual harassment. But even bawdy talk etc. Not everyone has the tact to not make this a potential powderkeg, it is not really safe to experiment with.

I personally have been sexually harrassed, and I'm sad to say, that as a man my earnest reaction was vicarious embarrassment. For me though, being sexually harassed by a woman does not come with it, a sense of loss of control, nor physical danger. It is for me, really, a non-issue. Only women with histrionic personality disorders scare me, and I try to distance myself from crazy. Fortunately, I've met only one that I know of.

That to me, says that part of the solution to sexual harassment demands a redefining of gender roles. Demand is a strong assertion, and I'm not confident I can back it up. But can you imagine how long sexual harassment induction videos would have to be to preserve office romance as a possibility when initiated by men. "If you make eye contact and she looks down and then back up, consider talking to her. If she sustains eye contact for longer than normal durations, you may experiment with flirtatious banter, if she..." (more important than that long list is the extra long list of tacit do-not-approach signals).

So, to me if you want to keep office romance possible in society, rather than depending entirely on online match making services (and maybe you do) it would mean women have to overtly initiate the romance. Assume the risk of rejection.

Perhaps what makes that trickiest of all, are that we are living in the age of anxiety, and I believe some 60% of women suffer from it (beyond the anxiety that is normal to the spectrum of human emotion). The most anxious thing I do, is ask women out. And I do it. 

Untrue Crime

Fargo the tv seriesis entertaining, but ultimately does not work as well, I feel, as the original movie did. Where the movie needed only William H Macy's character to be a singular incompetence to spread out like a contagion, the first series of fargo needed multiple incompetent characters to screw and counter screw up everything for the prolonged duration of the series. Same same but to a lesser extent with season two.

That said, Fargo is entertaining, the one thing that annoyed me everytime is leaving in the affectation of 'This is a true story, out of respect for the survivors the names have been changed, out of respect for the dead everything else has been told exactly as they happened' which was not true of the original film, and is not true of the fargo universe. Painting Minnesota as a place more dangerous than cartel controlled territories in Mexico.

Hannibal, is also entertaining enough. But those lauding a golden age of television needs must keep in perspective that a golden age of television is still far short of a golden age of cinema. There is a great show in Hannibal, it spans from midway in season 1 to midway in season 2.

Having never seen the movie 'Hannibal' as in, the third of Harris' novels, nor read said novel, I can't really tell if anyone ever did a good job of turning Hannibal into an anti-hero, or 'Dexterising' him.

But (spoiler aler - Hannibal does what is in the book) in the latter half of the second season, that tells the backstory of Mason Verger, we find a typical device of writers dealing with an anti-hero. Create somebody worse.

So we have the tasteful and elegant Hannibal, who by this stage of the series has done some evil things set against Mason. Who upon entering makes a child cry and absorbes his tears with a piece of paper. Which he collects. His history as a peadophile and abuse of his sister are alluded to, but not shown. Presumably due to it being a tv show.

Then he does more horrible stuff to his sister, and in steps Hannibal. Whom partly through self defence abducts Mason, disfigures and cripples him. We are as an audience at least, invited to feel conflicted, in part some visceral satisfaction that somebody did something horrible to horrible Mason, but also that that horrible thing is quite horrible.

But still, I struggle to enjoy or engage with Hannible, or Harris' greater universe of FBI profilers. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great article of how the profession of profiler is essentially reducible to that of psychics, and indeed based on the same 'cold readings' that clairvoyant charlatans use. The article is much more worth a read than this blog post if you can find it in the New Yorker, or get yourself a copy of 'What the Dog Saw'.

The other is that it much like Dexter, celebrates a portrayal of serial killers that makes them seem like eccentric artists. If you watch any serial killer documentaries, they are generally not at all admiral, captivating or even really interesting beyond the gruesome details of some of their crimes.

And as one tumblr feed of one of the more activist artists I follow once pointed out, in TV and movies if crimes are being committed by a white person, they become an 'anti-hero' somebody for audiences to try and identify with and root for. Sympathise with even, but not for people of colour. The closest we've ever been invited to sympathise with african american criminals by the post - was the Wire. Even then while The Wire brilliantly frustrates the viewer with all the short sighted frustrations within our society that block simple and viable solutions to crime, and makes the problem of drug related violence in Baltimore (and presumably, places like Chicago, Phillidelphia et al.) as a never ending multi-generational cycle, the ultimate rewards of the drug trade, for any individual gangster are prison or death.

Which brings me to Walter White of Breaking Bad. And here, there'll be spoilers galore. Thus if it's taken you longer to watch the finale than me, perhaps you should just go and watch it.

Thing is, that Vince Gilligan I believe set out wanting to do a series on the 'unmaking' of a man. Something like 'Mr Chips into Scarface' was the ultimate story arc. An interesting thought experiment, made for an entertaining narrative.

For me the last time I felt sorry for Walt was when he found out he was in remission and was going to live. He had a form of breakdown at that moment realizing his desperate measures to secure his families finances, were undertaken in vain.

After that I never really felt challenged about whether I was rooting for Walt or not. Walt had to die. Logic told me he would make it to the finale though.

There's a bunch of problems with Breaking Bad, non of them writing, directing, acting or even cinematography. But rather, the 'true crime' aspect. For example, the numerous arguments Walt and Jesse have about the people that get hurt from the conduct of their business. These people are never the numerous end users of their product. Though there are some episodes where the impact of meth on individuals and communities is portrayed. Jesse for example, is more concerned with the peripheral people in his life that get hurt by Walt and others (via poisoning and what not) or various other players they've had to kill.

Part of what makes Walt so evil, is that he does not operate exclusively in the criminal world, like most of the people he kills throughout the series. But is living a double life so we get to see the impact his choices have on people the mainstream audience presumably can identify with.

Otherwise, the main offended by the actions of Walt and Jesse, are kept at quite a distance. Though Jesse himself struggles with addiction, he also receives fat stacks of cash through his illicit activities. Thus his struggles with addiction are more reflective of a rock star's struggles than those whom are not in a socio-economic position to sustain their habit.

My understanding, is that Meth is horrible. I've read a few articles by one Australian journo that demonstrates how quickly one can descend into delusional psychosis while using meth. Louis Theroux's documentary on meth is pretty illuminating as well.

Much as we may have felt some sense of satisfaction as Walt found a way to use his old friends turned billionaire owners of Gray Matter that Walt sold out of, amusing. Where Walt used his gritty street smarts to convince them their lives were in constant danger should they not deliver his cash for him to his children. A fat cat Meth cook being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for producing a product that does as much damage as meth is probably far more reprehensible than overpaid CEOs actions that indirectly impoverish peoples or reap economic devastation on communities.

I feel Walt ultimately does take responsibility for his choices, and he feels a lot of pain resulting from the consequences. But Gilligan also used the 'someone worse' device to make Walt into a finale anti-hero. Introducing Todd and his Uncle, a gang of white supremacist bikers that don't just hurt Hank (like Walt and Gus did) but kill him. And don't just manipulate Jesse into being a cook, but actually imprison him. And don't just poison someone Jesse cares about to motivate him, but kills them in front of him.

After 6 months to a year (whatever the Time-skip is) it allows Walt to cruise in as a relative hero, a much lighter bad guy to rescue Jesse.

I can't help but feel that if it were the Wire, the series would have ended with Walt's arrest by Hank. Being stripped of his wealth, family, freedom and made account most of all to Jesse.

Instead, we have this extra bit tacked on, with extra bad guys, that Walt tidily resolves as a lone gunman against a crew of Bandits. Getting back everyone who fucked with him and granting Jesse his freedom.

Just before he dies. No good. No good at all.

At least Marlow was left in the Wire with the promise that his thug nature and personal ego virtually ensuring he would wind up in prison like his predecessor Avon Barksdale.

There's a place for crime in entertainment. Under a limited scope, a place to glorify it. I don't want to see nothing on TV but CSI Miami, where bad one liners and sunglasses acting result in proving criminals can't get away with anything, ever, anymore.

Just that criminals that do often get away with shit, pay a tremendous personal cost - which the Wire did brilliantly and Breaking Bad did well up until it's finale. Despite the fact that you run a tight criminal operation, the risks have to be ratcheted right up and this makes you constantly vulnerable (or fragile) to your whole world falling apart. Game over needs to be game over, and more or less the only things that fucked up Walt's attempt to retire and walk away, was that he was a family man, with a brother heading up the DEA.

Tomorrows future cooks can watch breaking bad, dream of turning some barrels of chemicals into millions of dollars, and the fact that they are young unattached university students means they don't have to worry about having their brother in law snoop around their house and discover a crucial batch of evidence.

Lacking from Breaking Bad, where the 'three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead' wisdom of Ben Franklin that would inevitably lead to any of the various arrangements the two get going coming undone.

Same goes for Hannibal, that while set in the modern era, doesn't appear to have him encumbered by all the various public surveillance that might prevent somebody from moving their people dismantling equipment into somebody elses basement, or even basic precautionary risk management from their FBI captain, deciding to pull everyone from future cases that has an existing relationship with an agent that is incarcerated pending trial for a series of murders.

The suspensions of disbelief are getting subtler. You have to notice how ludicrous it is that Gus would let Walt or Jesse into his home where he lives by himself. Or talk on mobile phones to any of his business associates. Or that the Cartel would bring their entire membership together to meet with one distributor from New Mexico. Or that Gus could walk into a nursing home and repeatedly visit one of the most distinctive residents and not be noticed or known. Or that Billy Bob Thornton can repeatedly walk in and out of his crime scenes, on foot. Or that it's possible to drive away from any crime scene without hitting some kind of police cordon.

Increasingl, the audience is required to notice an absence, in the implausible, rather than the presence of the implausible. Which is good writing, but if you are writing a show with criminal anti-hero's and you wipe away some of the commonplace things that would render their activities untenable in day to day life, you are to some extent being emotionally and socially irresponsible as a writer.

Dispensible

Think about it man, you get in traffic behind somebody. *Honks* *Honks* *Honks* *Honks* *Honks* *Honks* *Honks* *Honks*

Shut up and smoke that, it’s the law.

Oh, sorry. I was taking life seriously.

Is a relevant excerpt from a Bill Hicks rant on drugs. Every day (just about) I go to my studio and work furiously on drawings. Working furiously, is actually slowly and methodically, while watching TV shows on my tablet, but none the less, I generally do upwards of 5 hours a day at the moment. In fact I've figured out ways to more or less be working on art round the clock. Even at home, for which I'm now taking a break to write this post.

A rare privilege I have as I work away, is a very salient awareness that absolutely nobody is sweating on the output of my practice. The closest I come, is me. And should I die in my sleep tonight, at most the grieving stakeholders in my life would be inconvenienced by the unfinished work I leave behind.

Though I'm often impatient to leave for the studio, and reluctant to leave it for other commitments, I just can't feel stressed about the work I do. I could never convince myself that anybody was depending on it.

People enjoy my work, some even have a seemingly ravenous appetite for it. People have an insatiable lust for art and entertainment worldwide.

But it's easy for me to perceive a basic truth about the nature of what I do. Nobody is actually depending on it.

Then I re-watched Carpenter's 'Escape from New York' and the part of the premise I struggled most to suspend disbelief over, was accepting that the US President was vital enough to warrant Snake Pliskin's rescue effort. As compared to it's inferior sequel where the presidents' daughter steals a weapon to put in the hand of terrorists, I really can't see why the US President is regarded is indispensable.

And this leads to a fact I feel everyone should embrace. If you are currently reading this, it means that nobody that ever died, ever, was indispensable to our civilization.

I do not mean that individuals lives have no value, or that they are unimportant. Just that we can, and will take the hit of losing certain members.

What we shouldn't do, is maintain an illusion of importance. At least I don't feel so. I like to think of 'the stressed executive'. For me he is the driver of that car honking at the somebody in front of him. My particular favorite is the executive that works for a distributor of manufactured plastic garden hose attachments.

I know nothing about the industry, I don't need to. I can imagine that there are dominant players in the business, that move enough units through enough retailers, that their executives could drive Audi's or Mercedes and stress about Unit Sales, the threat of disruptive technologies, forecasting sales to meet production and shipping order deadlines etc.

I can see the person, that through the combination of limited promotion opportunities, mortgage stress and other economic pressures. Feels highly stressed about meeting some arbitrary sales target, achieving some bonus or landing some retail distribution deal.

This executive lives most of his/her days in a world populated by people that also think these things important but may have conflicting agendas.

Yet never in their lives will any of these people see a TV show in which there is a post-apocalyptic scenario caused by a worldwide scarcity of their product.

You and I, hopefully have the capacity to imagine that the world would indeed by inconvenient if we could never attach garden hoses again. Plastic attachments certainly have value, and though I would never describe myself as a gardener, or even somebody who plays under sprinklers in summer, I have experienced the inconvenience of a broken hose attachment in my life. I can envision a future where I buy these devices.

And my purchases in the marketplace send a signal to strangers to keep producing these things because people want them.

But I don't need them. A lot has to go wrong before I would truly bemoan the disappearance of this industry.

The storeowner (or increasingly, franchisee) that loses a sale due to being stocked out of a hose nozzle, that gets on the phone to blast his sales rep about their stock out, who kicks it up the line to the executive that sat in on the forecasting meeting that chose conservative figures based on a forecast of a wet summer three months prior, are all suffering from a collective illusion.

That these things matter is not the illusion. That they matter enough to get angry about is an illusion. Our lives are robust, as is our civilization. Much of what has made it so is a lot of inherent redundancy. It's not just likely, but actually essential that most of us will spend our lives on causes that actually don't matter at all. In part, because predicting what will actually be important or matter is incredibly hard.

While there's definitely a suggestion, but hard case to argue coherently, that art is somehow essential (many of us treat it as such), I'm aware that what I do is not very important in the grand scheme of things. And I enjoy what I do. It maintains the capacity and potential to be quite lucrative as well. Would the world notice it's absence? No. At best it might feel it. As I feel it, the very motivation to try and create what I want to.

I'm not arguing to find and follow your passion. I'm making the argument that accepting some humility can help you relax, and also help arrest a contagion of urgency highly likely to come both down and up the value chain of whatever it is you do.

One simple distinction that helped me when I was corporate was 'to know the difference between urgent and important'. Few do, they oil the squeaky wheel, feed the crying child.

Few people in my experience pull back to the large picture and think things through to their consequences. As such many people are stressed and anxious beyond any level that is actually useful.

I could relate this to the epidemic of anxiety we appear to be living through, but that feels like a separate post.

My defenses of Pin Up Art

2 years have passed since I quit KFC, with no backslides. It was a habitual, behavioral addiction, but note that I quit a particular franchise, not Fried Chicken. Not fast food. In the following months I escalated my commitments to behavioral sobriety by quitting McDonalds, caffeine, alcohol, refined sugar and pornography.

Those last two are tricky though, refined sugar is really a shorthand for 'confectionery, desserts, cakes, soft drinks etc.' I will for example, use condiments like tomota sauce and bbq sauce, I will eat bread but not donuts. etc. My 'no refined sugar' creates some confusion, but is more convenient in explaining to people why I won't accept whatever treat or beverage is being offered me.

Similarly, 'pornography' suffers from being an undefined term. Like sugar, it is in some form or other, everywhere and perhaps if one was to go absolutist and hardcore, it would be even harder to remove from your consumption than sugar.

What I quit is probably quite a narrow definition - the content of pornographic sites and materials. Everything explicitly marketed as porn, and generally labelled as the 'adult' industry.

The broadest definition I can think of is 'masturbatory aids' which would include things like lingerie catalogues (and subsequently a lot of outdoor advertising) in fact it would include anything that alludes overtly or even subtly to reproduction, including the cut of some garments hung on mannequins - that emphasize hip to waist ratios or cleavage.

My suspicion is that most post-tween males, consume pornography of the 'narrow' definition I quit. I also suspect women increasingly consume porn, even that created explicitly for a male audience for a range of reasons. But I also suspect there is a sizeable minority of women who do not, and possibly have never consumed pornographic material, but are none-the-less exposed to the ideas of porn, certainly affected by the broader definition of masturbatory aids.

I will not defend the adult industry as it exists, though I could certainly criticize much of the anti-porn arguments presented, not for their validity but for their execution and effectiveness in regards to the stated aims.

I would almost certainly recommend that men quit their consumption (and almost certainly addiction) to porn. Particularly adult video, that I would have to say, is more or less indefensible for 98% of the existing content.

Furthermore, in the internet age, the adult industry calls into question for me, the very notion of consent. Given that all people are terrible affect forecasters, and also it being a domain where the decision to enter porn is probably mostly driven by subconscious decisions, and conscious consent is largely rationalization. If that was a parade of meaningless words to you, essentially what I'm saying is, I question the validity of consent given by an 18 year old, on behalf of the same person that lives with those consequences. It's the most extreme version of Daria's "My goal is not to wake up at forty with the bitter realization that I've wasted my life in a job I hate, because I was forced to decide on a career in my teens." except that girl wakes up at 19 not forty.

But what of the broader definition? All body ideals that allude to a woman's fertility. The spectrum of pornographic photography - from porno stills to 'gravure' photo sets, to erotic art, to lingerie billboards? And particularly in the genre of art I myself create and contribute to - being pin up art.

I don't know if I could or would defend these, if seriously under threat. But here are my defenses, many of which are not intelligible arguments but simply the incongruities I struggle with.

1. Pin Up Artists

The Golden Era pin up artists, like Gil Elvgren I don't know much about except that he painted from live models or reference photos. That I presume were paid gigs for the models and if he was not the photographer, I see little evidence of exploitation. But I have no idea what he was like as a person, nor any of the others of his time. The same goes for Dean Yeagle, who started much earlier than many other contemporary artists. But when I look at Bill Pressing, Chris Sanders, Luis Gadea, Shane Glines, Tim Sale etc. I see artists that aren't misogynists, or overt chauvinists, often happily married and as far as I have materials to form an impression of their personalities, none are sleazy or creepy.

In short, being a pin-up artist does not appear to require one to be, or associate with negative people, nor even have the ideals portrayed in pin-ups with their overall attitudes toward women.

I also find the anti-porn argument that rapists and violent offenders towards women are often found to have hard drives full of porn to be a weak one. I'm sure the content of the argument is all true and valid. I would be super surprised if rapists and violent offenders proved the exception to the consumption of porn rule. And I'm sure the marketing of pornographic videos does not help, and possibly escalates the incidents of these kind. I just reject it as confirmation bias, I would have to see the statistics as to what percentage of men consume similar amounts of porn and never sexually assault or harass anybody. I suspect I know people that would make this argument while simultaneously making the equivalent counterargument as regards recreational drug use.

2. Sunk Costs and/or Absence of Evidence of Exploitation.

One arguable form of pornography along the spectrum I haven't quit are the photographic offerings of Van Styles and Cherie Roberts (potentially NSFW) whom shoot a lot of scantily clad models, with a similar lack of graphic content and most notably an absence of violence towards women, as pin up art.

At this point I'd like to acknowledge that specific differences of opinion would arise. At one extreme, I'm told there exists feminists that view all sex between men and women as rape, I can't present this argument myself, it was something like the patriarchy exists, therefore all women are oppressed therefore all sex is rape. I can't drive the premises to the conclusion, I feel and assume that even in gender studies academic circles, this would be a fringe position. But I would acknowledge that there's going to be people out there that will quite easily and readily reject the idea that there's a spectrum or continuum of porn, where some is okay and some is bad. I can't argue against people who object to the broad definition of porn in its totality.

The other difference of opinion, is that while I believe in consumer preferences, I don't believe in consumer activism, I'm firmly in the caveat vendor camp, not emptor camp. Of course, where consumption is a crime in and of itself, vis-a-vis theft, or street narcotics or snuff porn. But speaking to the general case, I don't envision a world where the onus is on the consumer to do the research many if not most consumer activists do, to consume ethically.

In that regard, there are photographers in a similar vein to Van Styles and Cherie that do what I will simply call the 'creep shot', I believe Terry Richardson to be a reputed creep photographer of women, but I've never checked out his work to see if he does it, and I won't name other offenders because I'm not speaking to their market. It basically involves the photographer reaching in and touching the model - pulling on their underwear or pinching their nipple, touching their ass etc.

I personally just find it creepy. That for me is the line, between a photographer being a professional and a creep. Even if it is some premeditated performance consented to by the model, what the performance conveys I don't like.

In it's absence, I cannot conclude with certainty, that the photographer is a professional, that the model is consenting is an equal collaborator in the project and fairly compensated. I can believe it though.

Thus there's much material out their that involves celebrating women's reproductive value that I at least, am okay with, and okay with consuming. I'm okay with it on the absence of evidence that it belongs with the body of pornographic material that I personally prefer not to consume.

But then you move onto pin-up art. Drawings, that do not necessitate a live model, nor actual woman to be objectified. You are creating a symbolic representation and literal object. That this can impact given people's sensitivities on viewers can't be ignored. But I am not in the censorship camp or game. The producer however can do so, without harming a woman in the production process.

Which is optional, there is still scope for pin up artists to employ live models, sexual harass them or harm them in other ways. It's just wholly unnecessary.

Now least you be a layman in terms of art and unaware, many if not most artists draw from reference materials. I myself when drawing pin ups most often use photo reference, more occasionally I draw women from memory.

While I generally avoid references drawn specifically from the adult industry, preferring reference mainly drawn from lingerie, swimsuit and fashion photography, here then an image exists - and there is an argument that this reference material used to inspire pin up art, is a sunk cost. Even if there was some exploitation or harassment involved in the process of creating the images I and other artists use as reference, it is in economic jargon, a sunk cost.

The artist using the reference in other words has no power to undo the harm done to the model, should that harm have occurred. I would like to think that if a reference image of mine were created involving harassment, psychological abuse or even physical violence, that it would taint the image. But I don't and can't know. I'm not going to accept the blanket solution, which is to draw pin ups entirely from memory.

Similarly my actions going forward will never erase the history of the pornographic industry which I have in part been exposed to, along with most of our society. Milt Kahl the arguable greatest of the Golden Era Disney animators urged artists to know their reference so well, that they didn't actually need it anymore. I'm sure I could draw many pin ups till the end of my days without actually having to look at a single reference image. Why don't I? Because I believe my creative output would narrow. Reference helps me break out of ruts.

3. GJ

I occupy a very priveleged position in this world. Having a practical if not divine dominion over pretty much every animal on earth. I'm also a cis-gendered Caucasian heterosexual male. Thus, though I believe evolutionary psychology to have valuable things to say on the matter of sexual politics, I acknowledge that it is distasteful for somebody as privileged as I am to make arguments along the lines of evolutionary determinism etc.

I believe in the modern technological era, the vast majority of gender is culture, or a social construct.

But in the crime drama 'Top of The Lake' by Jane Campion, there features a scene where GJ informs an underage girl that is pregnant and coming to full term 'there is wisdom in the body, it will know what to do.' or something to that effect, that's an argument people can't have both ways.

I concur with GJ, but to me that carries an obligation to acknowledge in the superficialities (and pragmatism) both genders exert in partner selection, the wisdom 'of the body' has to be respected.

For example, the obsession with youth, in women particularly the working life of most models happens to coincide with their peak fertility - 18-25. Most of what gets emphasized and in the case of pin up art, exaggerated, are fertility cues with women, followed closely by health cues.

Long lustrous hair 'average' faces (somewhat of a misnomer, given that the ideal average faces are actually the ones with high levels of symmetry, indicating a lack of gene defects - ie healthy complete chromosomes) ample bosoms, large hip to waist ratios, are not mere cultural indoctrinations. They have a biological basis, all suggesting the healthiest genes to pass onto your children.

Pin ups can create super-normal stimuli, which is to say hip to waist ratios that can't exist in nature yet nevertheless can hijack the viewers biology and turn them on. Same with the gravity defying breasts of female comic book characters and so on.

What I believe is generally lacking 'out there' in public awareness, is an awareness of the limitations of our biology as regards the consumption of erotic imagery. Not that there aren't enough plus sized models, overweight models, fat pin up girls etc. Because attempts are made to create these products and they don't succeed because they are created under the assumption that marketers have decided the market wants iddy-biddy waists and big butts, double d breasts and cherry red lips.

Our biology decided we like these things, the adverse health effects are in the saturation of the market, much like the refined sugar added to all foods.

The one person I know to speak of a preference for drug free, Midwife driven births, does not appear to have objections to pornography.

Thus it is only in my imagination that I see a population of people that are pro-standing water births, natural births etc. but anti-modern day fertility idols and iconography.

...

As I said, these aren't wholly formed, and fully intelligible arguments or defenses as to what I do, but these are the general themes and sticking points that I haven't reconciled yet with how I feel about some of the art I create.

Street Fighter 5 a lesson in diminishing excitement

Street Fighter II seemingly came out of nowhere and conquered the world. It blew my young mind. It was just a quantum innovation in gaming. We'd never seen such amazing character design. It was like a cartoon you could play. It had these 80's hangover characters in karate gi's but amazingly they could throw fireballs. It's hard to recall with the hindsight of history. But really the Hadouken had the same impact then as the Matrix's bullet-time sequence did years later.

The flaw of that analogy, is that the Matrix is similarly dated, though it's effects hold up better than SFII's frame rate. I would guess, but am not old enough, that SFII had a similar impact on young minds as Star Wars did when it premiered in the 70s.

Then came SFII Turbo, SF Alpha ... more importantly Mortal Kombat came out with it's more adult graphic violence and SF franchise kind of faded at the same time the fighter genre was swarmed with imitators, many of the me too franchises surviving to this day.

I liked Mortal Kombat 2 and 3. But I never liked it as much as Street Fighter. Largely because the artwork sucked. And that is something that I feel Street Fighter has never been eclipsed in. Street Fighter II broke into western markets long before Japanese animation or comics did. The influence Akiman has had on multiple generations of artists since the release of SFII is probably unparalleled, and behind only Jim Henson (The Muppets and Sesame St) and Dr Suess for capturing kids imagination both universally and early in their psychological development.

The difference being that it will remain true for a long time for Suess and Henson, I'm not so sure that any 12 year old kid would be particularly blown away by seeing Street Fighter 4 or 5. Kids get into it sure, I wouldn't be surprised but it must be like discovering Zeppelin at 16, from following back the genealogy of music that kid is into on the market of the moment back to its roots.

The real hidden gem, is perhaps the most perfect video game ever made - Street Fighter III: Third Strike. The peak of the franchise, though not the most popular. I myself overlooked 'the next generation' for quite some time, until I was standing in an arcade and saw how Necro moved across the screen.

That was like seeing a video game with a studio ghibli amorphous blob on screen. It's graphics were just superb.

It then took a long time for SFIV to come out. Perhaps in part because within the gaming community SFIII had so much longevity, it didn't cry out for a sequel, when it had a loyal fanbase still playing it.

I don't know and I imagine there are articles you can read on what caused the delay. SFIV has a lot to merit it in terms of game design, it's just not special and in the end kind of boring.

I first played it after SFIV: Ultra had long been in release. Which meant I had a roster of about 32 players to select from, very few of them new. I'm going to say this - SFIV was basically a reboot of SFII, the original cast were all in the first release of the game, plus some new characters none of which were particularly inspired. By Ultra, you had Ryu, Evil Ryu, Akuma/Gouki and Oni unlocked as playable characters, an evil clone of Cammy and really the only new cast member whose design worked was Juri. You also had a littering of characters from Alpha and Third Strike, and I later learned that SFIV was set after SFII but before SFIII in the timeline, so none of it really made sense.

It was basically a 'lets see what this looks like in 3d' which made for a very boring game, conceptually speaking, propped up only by a love of SF itself. Returning to SFIV from SFII were the car and barrel smashing rounds for the arcade play while dropping things like the parry system from SFIII.

I maintain that spiritually it was a reboot, a software upgrade, of the SFII concept. And it brought us the least inspired end boss perhaps ever - Seth. His design was boring, a bald muscle bound man, with a Chinese Zodiac orb in his stomach being the only point of interest. To be fair, Gil wasn't that interesting either, except having a half red-half blue sprite that actually alternated was the threshold of technological limits when SFIII was released. Gil also made sense, being styled after a greek god, he was the messiah of a cult after all.

Seth just copied everyone else's moves, so combat wise he was a mash up, and really to me I see his precedent in Shang Tsung of the Mortal combat franchise and Gorro, Shang Tsung's champion. Game play wise he was Shang Tsung and appearance wise he was Gorro, almost what you'd expect if those two had a love child.

I realise I haven't gotten to SFV/5 yet, but that's because crucially SFIV was the misstep by Capcom. The let the fandom run the asylum. A problem of this era. SFV stands to be worse.

Firstly, fuck 3d. From the get go. A franchise built on the strength of it's artwork, the Street Fighter 5 characters look like claymation, or worse Clay Fighter-esque. The specials or V-trigger attacks are much like SFIV, using the 3d to change up camera angles and some sfx to create mini pieces of theatre in the fights. These look good presenting a reveal clip in a convention, but I found became annoyingly repetitive in actual gameplay.

Contrast these to the special attacks in 3rd Strike, the screen freezes and gives the player a mere moment to say 'Oh Shit' In fact, let's just compare them now:





Now I deliberately chose the R.Mika reveal just because hers is whimsical (the super art equivalent is right at the end of the trailer) and you can see, I need to actually use cinematography terms to describe what happens graphically when the skill is executed. Minus a parry system too, there's really only seconds of frustrated helplessness if the attack is landed, if you are playing the recieving party of the super art. In Third Strike, even if you weren't the instigator, you could get excited by the prospect of parrying the attack Daigo style.

The streaky streams of watery effect don't do much for me. They seem to have evolved out of the 'inky' effect in SFIV which at least was an acknowledgement that they had moved from 2D drawings to 3D sculptures.

I don't like 3D, I don't even particularly like 3D animation, many a 3D animated Movie I've seen the concept art for, video games too and marvelled at how much has been lost translating the 2D design to 3D rig. That's certainly the case with Streetfighter 5 and is probably the major plughole that drains my excitement.

But that's not all. Even though SFIV featured the entire roster of SFII fighters, Capcom once again drew on that same stable of characters for the initial release. Ken now wears a compression singlet, Cammy no longer paints camo on her legs, Chun Li and Ryu haven't changed, M Bison has gone grey and has tails on his coat, Vega is wearing a shirt... who cares, these characters may be beloved and there may be an extant fan base that wants characters they 'know how to play' but it isn't exciting.

The new characters are also not exciting, with the possible exception of the Maori character. Unforch he seems to have been inspired by Dragonball Z, and I can't see past that.

More unfortunate is FANG the endboss revealed this week. He is more interesting than Seth, and a departure from the Sagat-M.Bison-Gil-Seth hulking tank like endbosses of the series so far. But FANG appears to have been inspired by the Peacock character from Kung Fu Panda 2. Same archetype, insidious, lythe, gaunt, slightly mad, a little aristocratic and very very avian.

The rest of the diminishing excitement, is not intrinsic design flaws, or thought processes, but the product of our times, particularly when dealing with nerds.

SFII comes out, and you have this amazing new feature of having 8 characters to choose from. Ken, Ryu, Chun Li, Guile, Blanka, Zangeif, Dhalsim & E Honda. Which was crazy, its predecessor and most games up til that point gave you an option of 2. Ken in fact was just the 2P carbon copy of Ryu in the original Street Fighter. On your own you pretty much had to be Ryu.

Then the amazing thing was, that after you fought your way tournament style through the roster you had to fight Balrog, Vega, Sagat and the end boss M. Bison. 4! 4 fully formed, concieved and designed boss characters. It was unheard of and nobody imitated it really, no major players. MK just had two and the top boss morphed into all the other players on the roster.

The real innovation though was expanding the player roster to 8, not the 4 unplayable bosses. Street fighter had 2 fighters for each country culminating in the end boss Sagat. So there were effectively more unplayable characters in its predecessor. I suspect the decision to have four executive bosses to fight was a transition.

And sure enough by SFIII you had one boss Gil, and later they added Urien as a sub-boss. And I suspect since Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, the mentality has been if we develop a character we may as well let people play them.

But what will never be captured again is the surprise and mystery of these unknown boss-characters that came with SF2. Even Gil the first time I saw somebody good enough to actually reach him in third strike was still surprising, because SF3 wasn't released in a convention driven era.

The current era now has teaser trailers for teaser trailers for movies. Drip fed to nerdfans who just cannot possibly go without in order to increase their pleasure on release.

I suspect this happened with SFIV but to be honest, I actually paid less attention to IV because of the 3d thing. V I can't ignore though. And it seems they've doubled down on the oversharing by adding the net-release beta versions this time round.

So not only do we have a convention tour where new characters from the roster got revealed or announced each time, but the game gets released for testing by the actual fanbase, and people hacked it and got even more info. Such that FANG who was revealed earlier this week, had had his voice files ripped out and listened to weeks prior to his actual announcement.

Why do nerds do this to themselves? I feel by experiencing the frustrating excitement of 'that looks cool' today, we diminish the actual pleasure we derive from discovering it at a time where we can play it for what it is.

I suspect this is even true of beta testing. With the exception of whether you are playing the betas to gain a competitive advantage in future tournaments. If so, do your beta testing as tournaments at conventions, rather than world wide releases downloaded onto a bunch of nerds computers.

I already know which characters are going to be DLC for a game that hasn't actually been released yet. I know everything there is to know except the experience of actually playing it. And those doing the beta testing, don't even have that to look forward to. Just a continuation of an experience they've had trickled out to them and restricted. Surely making it the most boring way to learn the game.

Street Fighter III is a near perfect game because it was risky. They had one of the best known franchises in the world, they had been eclipsed by then by the Mortal Kombat franchise and Capcom
some how looked inwards and said 'it's the next generation' they went in with a roster of unknown players (they later appended Ryu and Ken onto the roster, but they weren't initially intended to be in it) Designed the shit out of them so they looked and played unique. Kept it 2D, backed their artists and animators and launched it.

What happened to that Capcom? Now SFV looks like a me-too product, a 'sequel' that breaks as little new ground as Fallout 4 does over Fallout 3. The new aspects aren't very inspired. They ask the fans what they want and try to give it to them, the trouble being that fans rarely say 'I want to be surprised' what they say is 'I want Ryu and Ken, and R Mika, and Zangeif and ooh ooh...' And this is what we've got. And they can't let it just drop and see the reaction, they have to tease it out and test it and focus group it and have it trialled by fandom.

I hate this new era of game design. I'd share my suggestions as to what I'd do to make an awesome SF game but it would be hypocritical as a fan to say Capcom should listen to me, when I'm asking them to stop listening to fans.

Intimidating

I don't actually know how common this situation is, because it tends to be exchanged between two people in private. If at all. And at least in my case it is very assymetrical, as in I tend to be on the recieving end of the confession rather than the confessor.

But it happens to me periodically, which is to say I have somebody confide in me in a quiet moment after a period of knowing (or knowing of me) that they find me intimidating. I do experience a feeling of intimidation, but most commonly it relates to approaching artists that I actually admire, the thing is that I have a professional need to cross that line and put myself out there. To back down is to betray my craft and if not lose, forestall all I've invested.

Aside from that, the notion of finding somebody intimidating, particularly somebody like me, is very strange from the inside looking out.

I think perhaps best captured by Omar's trip to get Cheerios. Though obviously I am not a rip-and-run gangsta. I'm a call center employee and artist, who has probably earned less than the street value of the package Omar picks up at the end of that clip.

But recently through some correspondence, I had the good fortune to actually get walked through the cognitive side of being intimidated, by me particularly. it's as fascinating as it is frustrating.

There are certainly behaviors I have that are consistent with intimidation. I tend to unconsciously dominate the spaces I am in (once comfortable) and rarely adobt sumbmissive body language. There are times I consciously do this as well. I also have habits of being dismissive of people, terminating conversations etc. That part I can own, and have owned for years.

But the insight was, how much of intimidation just happens in the observers mind. Kind of like this old Gregory Peck movie 'The Million Pound Note' which I just wikipediad and learned it was of course based on a Twain short story. But basically, because this guy has a million pound note back at the turn of the century, he never has to actually spend any money, his wealth never gets tested.

In the same way, having the rationale of somebody who wants to approach me but can't, spelled out for me is an exercise in not even testing the basis of my intimidation. I'm very grateful to this person for writing to me, and in this specific case, it had no basis.

Changing all the deets, the process worked like this. They observed me and concluded that central to my life was a love of pottery and ancient persian history. They felt they knew nothing about these topics and thus would not have anything to offer on them conversationally. So they didn't converse with me.

If these two fields were truly my heart and soul and domain of expertise, then I don't actually need anyone I interact with to know shit about them. This is how I presume everyone works. We all seem to have the intuition that we don't need to hold a medical degree ourselves to converse with a doctor. And some doctors presumably are passionate about what they do.

Indeed, I don't actually need anybody to be anything. Particularly not for me. What I need is to find what is interesting about other people.

I'd like to know more about intimidation. The psychology of it. This isn't the healthy application of anger I am talking about where intimidation is used to avoid potentially costly conflict. But where people find other people unapproachable. I suspect it might be akin to judgement in some way, perhaps its reverse. Judgement is employed most commonly to find people who are even worse than us at things we are insecure about. Perhaps intimidation is where we find people who by their existence emphasise our own felt deficit.

It would apply to my relationship with artists I admire, and possibly fit my friends description as well.

There is of course a self-fulfulling prophecy about being intimidating though, in that I don't actually desire the company of people that cant step to me, or converse with me. Of course, if people can merely enact these behaviors, they are no longer the people I don't desire the company of, they are people I would readily befriend.

Living the Montage

I just finished my third 12 hour day in studio in a row. I'm currently doing a bunch of painstaking practice, the sort of work that gets covered in 30 seconds - 2 minutes in a movie. It'd be interesting to see an actual montage of a kid going away to get good at being an artist. Like they show him hitting a note book at age 12, and then a bunch of select crops as he learns contour, rendering, massing, construction, foreshortening, perspective, composition, colour etc. And then at the end of the montage he is 40 years old, but a master illustrator/painter whatever.

And while I say painstaking, it's where I want to be, and I think that's the secret of the montage. Not that they take a long time in real time, but that they require you to actually love doing that work.

Send in the Actuaries aka Rule of Law

I walked past a guy having an angry rant against muslims on the street today. We're screwed. Really.

I actually don't really know what went down in Paris, the details I know is roughly 130 people dead, the assailants showed up at a concert, a restaurant and several other civilian targets. And one of them said something to do with Syria.

That's as much as I know, and more detail I earnestly don't care about.

I'm sure conspiracy theories already exist, and that is but one extreme of stupidity. The far more normal stupidity committed en masse and abetted by our news cycle, is confirmation bias. Those looking for proof that ISIS and Islam, Terrorism in general is out to destroy the western world for whatever fiendish general inherent badness that causes these acts.

And like a belief that vaccination causes autism, sense is much harder to reastablish than whooping cough, polio etc.

And I wouldn't blame the media, because they are a business. They are under pressure to deliver news people want to hear. News that maintains interest and switches viewers on. I feel the major deficit is in our leadership. And I imagine leadership everywhere has been hearing 'we have to respond to this.'

I would like to see my leadership take a response that is not so much humane as simply human. To say 'we've been hurt and we need to grieve' coming from our leaders, with reassurances that the police, and not civilians on the street are the ones under pressure to deal with the crime committed.

And here I possibly get harsh, maybe even sound psychotically dispassionate. But not only do I want terrorism to be dealt with by police (rather than state vs state warfare, with drone bombs etc) but I'd like the leadership to consult with people who cost terrorism right. Because the problem with public opinion is that it's the same minds that can't figure out the odds of Deal or No Deal, the average person gets tricked out by shit all the time, simple shit.

Like in Thinking Fast And Slow - their example was that a ball and a bat together cost $1.10 and the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? 10c right? Wrong, 5c. But that 10c is the quick and instant intuitive wrong answer that crops up first in most people's minds. And while people have the capacity to smell the trap and quickly correct themselves before blurting out the first (wrong) answer that comes into their mind, we routinely make mistakes like this without picking it up.

Which is why I want somebody in the leadership circle saying '129 people were killed. By comparison, a lone gunman in Norway in 2011 killed 67 people. The 2004 Madrid train bombings killed 191 people. The 2001 September 11 attacks killed 2977 civilians. The 2002 Bali Bombings killed 202 people.' and just lay down the numbers.

Then some actuary to way up the costs, both human, and financial in the 'classic' response to these attacks. Particularly on the human side, the number of civilian casualties in Iraq alone, from 2004-2011 is more than all the fatalities from terrorist attacks in the west put together by a margin of 100,000.

And I understand the reasons that the fact that civilian deaths at weddings as the result of drone strikes authorised on insultingly minimal intelligence are not reported to the public on a daily basis. But if the world is 'to change forever' in the wake of Paris' attacks, I for one can only hope that it changes in the notion that it's much harder for the powerful to attack the weak now, without it coming back on us.

Regardless of who started it, or what noble cause. The simple fact of the matter is, that if a nation state cant reasonably hit back against the west (indeed the only chance an Afghani or Iraqi combatant has to kill a US or European soldier is if we ship our soldiers over to them). What the weak can do, is attack us where we are weak. And it takes a tremendous amount of effort and coordination for a terror cell to kill a number of civilians that is easily inflicted on whichever nation they represent by drone strikes with monotonous regularity.

And the fact is that the more effective we get at 'fighting' terrorism, the worse terrorism gets. This is one where we need to stop struggling. Because all the decision makers, all the active players win. Civilians pick up the tab.

Civilians don't need to pay for a problem to get worse. They need to grieve, they need to be told to grieve. To sit at home and just cry their heart out.

Remember that scene in Inglorious Basterds? Where the good guys get found out because the British German-Speaker holds three fingers up the English way, rather than the German way? We don't live in that world anymore, where one can so easily be convicted based on foreigness. Those fucking days are gone and they aren't coming back.

The Paris attacks are to a leader, a decision maker, ultimately negligible in terms of the real costs. The psychological costs are what are hard to deal with. Just as it is more likely that your daughter will be killed in your friends pool, than it is to get killed by your friends gun. The former is tragic where the later causes outrage. And civilians getting killed going about their day in the west is outrageous. It breaks a social contract that simply doesn't exist for most people in the world.

A nation that gets outraged about this breaking of a social contract, or 'the sanctity of the theatre' as Nolan described the shootings at an opening of The Dark Knight Rises. Anyway, nations that find this outrageous can't have it both ways. As in, you can't be enjoying the economic benefits of subjecting other nations to these outrages.

Independent agents, furthermore should not be the decision makers for which states go to war with which states. Some ISIS members should not be able to trigger enough wrath to bring down on the nation of Syria and its people.

Visualisation Epiphany

The work doesn't come out like I envision, because I can't actually envision it. This is an expansion of my earlier revelation (by a couple of years) that I don't know what anybody looks like. Which isn't to say I can't recognise people I know. I'm not face blind, but when you sit down without photo reference and try and draw somebody, it exposes that your mind doesn't actually keep a photo in it of a person's face or better yet a 3d model. Instead there's some mental shortcut of a few features and maybe some measurements of how far apart.

In the same way, an idea is not a picture in your head. Just a few floating elements in space.

It's not bad, it's just that you sometimes need to work shit out on the page, 3 or 4 times before it comes together.

"Mansplaining" Mansplained

I like thinking about 'mansplaining' because it's not that I could go either way on it, so much as I go both ways on it.

And it bothers a lot of men, though I don't know why it should. I can sympathise but not empathise.

Fact is, mansplaining is good or bad in my view, based on context. Good as a consciousness raising exercise/feedback exercise to make somebody aware of their own hubris, often subconscious, habitual behavior.

Specifically when 'mansplaining' is used in reference to a man explaining to a woman what it's like to be a woman, or a feminist, what feminism is. More generally there's a faux pah whenever a non-expert presumes to explain to an expert the experts domain of expertise, either relatively or absolutely.

I'm absolutely pro-that usage of mansplaining, negative reinforcement evoking embarassment. Though in my limited experience of the general phenomena (I once had new recruit I had to train up to take over my old job, and he had this almost pathological habit of trying to teach me what I was needing to teach him) The act is committed as a result of obliviousness. It can be hard to interrupt a man on a roll. 

And here is my limited sympathy: having been a member of my high-school debating team, I've personally experienced being lauded and applauded for making shit up and sounding authoritative about it. MBAs at Harvard have 'air-time' as an assessment criteria (how much attention a student in class can command for themselves) and I'm sure with everything I know of business school, if the Harvard MBA is doing it, it will trickle down in some form to a condoned behavior in every business class and culture. 

I still have bad habits from my own education, the lazy shorthand of making arguments pre-faced by 'research shows...' there's no research, none I would ever bother to verify. It's just a dick move to try and sound convincing, or present opinion as fact.

The thing is, there's so much positive reinforcement of this behavior out there. That's the limits of my sympathy towards men who find themselves getting bitten suddenly in a context that every other time they've been getting a pat on the head for it. That and those TV adds where a family has a doofus know it all dad, but everyone else humors him, leaving him oblivious to the fact that mum or kids are really running things. That cliche isn't based on nothing, I've witnessed the family hostage to a doofus playing the traditional role.

The plain and simple fact is that mansplaining is bad, experts should not have to take lessons from non-experts. That's the wrong way round, the flow has to go from expert to non-expert. Informed opinions to the uninformed. 

Ironically, I've experienced the inversion of mansplaining, often in feminist blog content. Specifically reading original research that explains to me what it is to be a man. This doesn't make it equivalent, it just suggests that the error of assymetrical insight is common to just about everyone. Mansplaining to me should be a matter as banal to deal with as when right wingers try to explain the arguments of left wingers and vice versa. The only complication is that given the narrow political spectrum available to most voters, left and right wingers are kind of equal, where men and women are not.

There are many ways though, down in the detail of what it means to be human and genetics and all that shit that men and women are equal. And as men and women are equal in intelligence, so too are they in stupidity. 

It's just a fact, a bunch of people aren't good at arguing, just as a bunch of people are pretty worthless at the martial arts (or other martial arts). 

And mansplaining gets misused as something to throw at a man asserting any argument, whether it be within his domain of expertise or not. A tit-for-tat tactic in effect if not intention, resulting in men feeling dismissed and getting pissed off and dismissive as a result. And if the patriarchy is the one enjoying all the privelege, any tactic that results in dismissing feminist voices is a bad one.

At best, you wind up with men being selective about the feminist voices they listen too, and that is not ideal. Particularly if they select out any voices that use or refer to mansplaining, because mansplaining has good and instructive uses.

But as a man explained "If you want to gather the honey, don't kick over the beehive" the man being Dale Carnegie and his expertise being 'how to win friends and influence people' which really isn't gendered at all. 

I would speculate that a rich source of progress for feminism and equality is getting the patriarchy to create feminist spaces within its territory, mainly the collective mindset of men. And I suspect it's probably easier than anticipated because most men don't identify as misogynists, and the advantage of privilege being invisible to those who possess it, is that we don't realise and aren't invested in our oppressive behaviors. 

Until you consciously characterise somebody as an oppressor, where people often live down to your expectations. But there's a counterpoint, and hence why I go both ways. I've never had to fight oppression myself, and thus I don't get to say how. So if you want to overuse mansplaining, use it as a weapon rather than a tool of instruction, knock yourself out.

The empiric method really only gets to say whether you should or shouldn't do so. 

"At Least You're Aware..."

I have a very simple approach to ethics, good or bad whatever I discover about myself I have to own it and be transparent.

In my own shorthand I call it 'ethics of the devil' being that the devil is not really a problem in most anecdotes no matter how evil he be, so long as he identify as the devil. He's a known quantity, literally associated in all cultures with being evil and bad.

But it's not for everyone, and I'm not even sure if it stands as good ethics. I just find it practical, as in, I'd rather be known as honest than good. Because if a person finds anything objectionable about me, like my lack of caring for the plight of domesticated farm animals being exploited, then people can treat me as a known quantity, and freely associate with me or not.

What troubles me though, is how many people don't take the obvious objection to my honest stances and choose instead not to object. To apologise for me instead - and what I've heard on more than one occassion is 'at least you're aware of it...' 

And I understand where it comes from, for example there's a lot of white guys whom are not aware of their biases, and their subconscious racism and misogyny that manifests in them hiring, training, developing and promoting guys just like them in their job and industry. These guys aren't aware of their privilege and probably think of themselves as educated and progressive.

Even when criticised for the lack of diversity in their organisations or even in their produce, these guys will be taken aback under the impression that they've fostered whatever they control as a product of merit not privilege.

And hence, I get a 'at least you're aware...' that I'm in the above category in terms of biases and privileges, and yeah, those biases can be subconscious and broadly speaking and particularly in the instant I have no control of it. 

But that I'm aware of it, is little consolation, I suspect it to be the kind of rationalization or halo effect when people want to like me and can't accept the elements of my personality that are distasteful. I have a taste for confronting the distasteful in myself, but I suspect others don't neither in themselves or people they want to be friends with.

Awareness is only redeeming if followed by action. And for the most part when I become aware that I'm less perfect than I presumed, my response is relaxing, rather than acting. 

I shrug this shit off. Much as when I see a photo of myself that I don't like or find unflattering I generally respond with 'oh well, that's what I look like.'

I'm a comic artist again

I've been telling people I want to be a comic artist for years. I've written at least 3 scripts for comic projects I've wanted to draw and ultimately had to abort.

But now I've got an indefinitely ongoing one up and running. It's a steep learning curve and I at least am noticing the improvement in each chapter as I move from unconscious incompetence through to conscious incompetence to at this stage conscious competence. 

So while scrappy, I'm quite proud of it. My creative process has long since consisted really of stripping back an idea in ambition until it's something I can do. But as such I'm always producing at the limits of my ambition and comfort. I hope to get at least 15-20 chapters out of this project and currently am sitting on 3. 

So check it out, because I can finally tell people I meet at parties that I'm a comic artist again:

lettheworstcome.blogspot.com

Naught for Nothing

There's this scene in My Name is Earl somewhere... where it is revealed Earl is afraid of flying, and his brother Randy asks Catalina if she's afraid of anything and she says 'snakes and rape.'

We used to live in a world where there were real things to be afraid of. Furthermore, there was some point in our youths where we learned a bunch of names for phobias, meaning that we talked about fears not anxieties.

Not to trivialise anxiety, nor add to its stigma. I've had one anxiety attack and it was highly unpleasant. I've been afraid many more times in my life, innumerable times. Just today I was reminiscing about a sand dune I climbed in my youth, that being a sand dune created an artificial horizon once you had climbed it, and heading back down had me irrationally afraid of it becoming a cliff. Fortunately a younger kid in our group voiced his fear and spared me the ridicule, but as an adult I realise it was tricking out the automatic devices in my mind hooked up to my eyes and giving me a sense of vertigo about approaching the edge.

I presume this very device has kept many of my ancient ancestors from falling off cliffs and precipices and crumbling rock walls, allowing them to live and reproduce so I can be their ancestor.

Irrational though it was that a mound of sand would suddenly erode away into a sheer cliff face, that fear was most definitely not like my one and only ever anxiety attack. More akin to that were the dreams I had about running, where I would get stressed by the physical sensation of paralysis that occurs in REM phases, as the Victorian High School cross country meets played out in my mind.

I'm wondering though, if I now live in a world where I am surrounded by people who have a reverse ratio to me. Who've experienced anxiety innumerate times and fear once to never. I mean all of us experience anxiety, it's within the normal spectrum of human emotion.

But I seem to, and to be honest, resent living in a world where people are afraid of feeling 'awkward' or 'weird' a perpetual high-school where life's objective is to avoid humiliation.

I feel like I live in a world where dismounting from the uneven-bars induces in me a fear of breaking my ankle, and landing awkwardly, san broken ankles is a good outcome for me. I really don't give a shit about my grace in sticking a landing, just that I stick the landing. Everyone else, someway somehow is operating on a level where the worst possible outcome is that they stumble, ever so slightly.

I suspect some technologist built the world around me, and probably less recently than I imagine (I imagine back to the 80s, but it could have been some disciple of the Buddha) felt like it was possible through modern innovation to remove all human suffering.

Obviously, that hasn't succeeded, but it hasn't stopped a bunch of people from trying. Nassim Taleb has this beautiful derogatory term 'fragilista' to describe entities like Alan Greenspan and Gordon Brown whom set about trying to remove economic recessions from the economic cycle forever, resulting in the current state of the world economy. But that kind of digresses from the point.

Consider that if you are reading this, it's highly likely you have never in your life needed to actually contemplate a concept like 'food security' which refers to your access to basic calories of food intake. You've probably stressed more in your life over the excess of calories you consume and probably even expend money and/or energy trying to compensate for just how much food you eat. Even while complaining about being broke.

Whereas large chunks of the world's population do worry about food security, and I don't know, but I strongly suspect, they don't much worry about social anxiety. The populations that hike miles for clean drinking water, I also suspect don't have bullying epidemics driving up youth suicide rates.

This may seem to be straying far from what my seeming problem with people devoting energy to avoiding weirdness and awkwardness is, but I see them as related.

I suspect a lot of people now live under a credo where for various reasons, they think it is possible to get things without giving anything. Buy a house and your capital will appreciate without you doing anything to earn it (although, plenty of people think renovating a property before flipping it does something, I strongly suspect the time you spend renovating before flipping the property contributes more to the appreciation than the renovations themselves.) or that by racking up enough degrees somebody will just pay you to do your dream job. Or that by swiping right on an app your soulmate is going to find you.

And perhaps being able to steal intellectual property, virtually consequence free for almost 2 decades and a booming (at least still in Australia) property bubble have helped seed a mindset that thinks you can get something for nothing, take no personal risk. I went to private school and that certainly drummed in that if you just worked hard at memorising the limited sets of problems you are tested on, then you can pretty much just pick your career.

Give me the society where senior high school students have to bet their futures on a stud-poker match. Where luck plays a visible role and from an early age kids have to accept that sometimes you lose, sometimes you fail and sometimes you just have setbacks.

I suspect some of the worst treatment I receive is a product of a golden rule for this era of extreme risk-aversion, failure aversion. If I apply to a job, where my resume is being reviewed by a person who grew up fearing rejection, that person is likely to not want to subject me to a rejection letter, so they just don't call. Of course, in our current job market where 100 applicants swarm over one position, it's more likely that it simply isn't feasible to contact all the unsuccessful applicants. But say I ask somebody out who could never bring themselves to do so, I am beginning to suspect this is the driver beyond the modern phenomena of simply not answering - particularly as Aziz Ansari pointed out in an increasingly text based communication culture.

Most practically frustrating for me, is trying to draw audiences to an art show from people that would never do what I do. Are studying their hardest so they don't have to. But somebody has to, that's the catch. These are what employers are, the risk takers or descendents of risk takers that gambled big to command the resources.

I'm gambling my future on selling pretty pictures. I'm trying to sell it to people that don't even use their real names on facebook, that don't click 'like' on statuses they like. People that won't answer a question unless it has a clear criteria for success outlined by some academic.

These people understand me as little as I understand them. And yet I have to work with them, convey to them somehow, that because they'd never exhibit their own art in a show, it still means something to me for them to turn up to my show and look at my pieces, and judge them. Yes, I want them to do to me, the very thing they are most terrified of being subjected to themselves.

How do you sell that?

Homosocial

Of which I'm sure I've called a post before. Homosocial refers broadly to societies/cultures where social activities are carried out in gender groups, or to inversely define it - men and women don't socialise together.

Homosocial cultures bring about all kinds of problems, but it was only while doing a recent run of Inktember (Inktober brought forward a month) that I had the epiphany that these problems aren't distributed equally.

Specifically, I was waxing speculative on the 'mysterious loner' appeal, that is portrayed in pop culture and literature (Bronte sisters etc.) where women become fascinated with a loner, and ultimately attracted to him.

Because I didn't know if this was a real life phenomena, or a bi-product of giving male protagonists a love interest (ie, a protagonist serves a function, particularly in fiction of giving us a relatively normal character to identify with in that world, that is a proxy tourist often meeting and interacting with characters far more interesting than them, like Luke Skywalker, Mad Max etc. this means they are often like the audience themselves out of their depth and in foreign territory, so they don't accept or act in accordance with the norms - giving these characters a love interest helps fulful audience fantasies vicariously - so maybe loner appeal is reverse engineered from this, and is no more real in reality than becoming a Jedi Knight is.)

Anyways, point is, I don't know. It could be a real thing or not, but instead I wrote at length about my experience with being ostracised from a female social circle, where likewise, I didn't actually know what I was supposed to do because I've never been a teenage girl. What was weird was that when I asked my female friends for advice, though almost all had experienced it - nobody told me, or seemed to know, what you are supposed to do.

This article established that it was a real thing though: http://quillette.com/2014/02/05/how-women-gossip-and-gang-up-on-each-other-to-get-what-they-want/

And they seem to link to actual research, which I never checked out.

Generalsing of course, observing female social dynamics in highschool exile/ostracism is a form of violence employed by women - social violence if you will. Whereas in male social dynamics physical violence can resolve and relieve social tension (by clearing up ambiguity in a vertical hierarchy) or if the ambiguity remains - exile/ostracism is a form of avoiding violence - two boys agree to disagree and stop associating with each other.

Here an asymmetry arrises. If you are angry at one of your girlfriends, and you have the social clout, kicking her out of your group can feel like a death sentence to her and she can come and beg and scrape and claw her way back in, resulting basically in conformity behavior. Try it on your boyfriend and you may overhear him saying 'I don't know what her problem is.'

This is but one asymmetry though, what got me thinking though, was that a woman who climbs the top of a female hierarchy dominating those in her social circle, could prove almost completely ineffective once engaging a male hierarchy. Which is a problem if you are seeking real power, rather than obtaining it via proxy by becoming the mate of a dominant male who possesses real power.

Here's where it's tricky, I recently heard a female colleague site the old 'boys do better in coed schools where girls do better at all-girls schools' dilemma. You can't enact a top-down educational system that ensures the best performance for everyone. I don't know how widely known this sentence is, but evidently parents still send their kids to coed schools, and parents still send boys to all-boy schools. So there's a persistent difference of opinion.

The trouble is that I've never had it defined for me as exactly what 'do better' means. If we are talking academically, then this finding isn't worth the energy burnt to illuminate the pixels on your screen. If it is more holistic, taking into account in particular mental health/life satisfaction outcomes and actual non-academic career outcomes then it is worth paying attention to.

I'm not a parent but I speculate that regardless of the genders of my children, I'd send them both to coed schools in any circumstance. I see it as an extension of my preference for dealing with what is.

But I'm not consistent on this principle. In economics I'm all for segregating an economy so you can actually operate things like decent labor practices without having to worry about what the most populous nations of Earth are doing with theirs. I could rationalize that acknowledging that an economy like Australia is not going to have much sway over Chinese labor practices and subsequently throwing up some barriers to trade (particularly in the labor market) is a way of strategically dealing with this ''what is' but then I'd have to say, removing men from salience in the minds of female students would be dealing with 'what is' in the exact same way.

And furthermore, I'd be the first to agree that not just women, but any in-group needs safe and exclusive forums within which they can discuss and understand the world in which they live. In the same way that the House of Commons needs parliamentary privilege so they have a safe place to criticise their head of state.

The trouble is when you become homosocial, which needn't apply only to genders, it arises quite commonly and naturally in one form or another - when you socialise exclusively with people who think like you do.

And the big problem is the asymmetry, if rich people of influence only associate with rich people of influence, that's a much bigger problem for the poor and under-represented in society than it is for the privileged elite. Likewise, if feminists just operate in their safe spaces for women, engaging by and large exclusively with other feminists and industry continues to be dominated by a patriarchy, that plays right into the patriarchy's hands, and is a problem for feminists.

One of the wanky things I've heard said about artists was 'artists move freely through society' but it is one I would concede to be true. I socialise with bankers down to drug addicts, and for some reason dress codes and even enclothed cognition don't seem to apply to me. Last year I had a Friday evening Christmas party with fellow deadbeat artists, the next night I was at Christmas drinks with Cardiologists. I like it, and I actually don't feel much ingroup-outgroup dynamics.

Artists can certainly get cliquey, and this generally results in those artists being shit. It's a long time since the impressionists formed their own Salon, and people popped their monocles in reaction to any art. But I know in my prior life as a Sales Support worker for a power equipment importer, that in the three years I worked in that department, I saw the world through a prism that greatly overvalued the importance of things like rainfall, exchange rates and demographic shifts power tool usage.

Or as Malcolm Gladwell loves to quote 'To a worm in horseradish the world is horseradish.'

There's a delicate and dangerous balance between creating a safe place for like minded people to gather and discuss ideas, and forming a homosocial clique. Fortunately, I am a white straight male born into middle to upper class Australia. If I screw up and live in a homosocial culture, my advantage is most likely going to compound. If you don't belong automatically to an absolutely priveleged outgroup, ie a disadvantaged outgroup, you can stuff up, and stuff up badly.

Strangely, disability advocacy groups seem to understand this, even as they naturally employ many people with disadvantages internally - their mission is almost always about raising awareness and fostering opportunities for inclusion. But disadvantages along the lines of gender or race feel to me, far more prone to playing into an us-them dynamic, ostensibly wanting inclusion but focusing on their own and the outgroups relative otherness.

I could be wrong, but I look to Japan where homosocial culture is actually a big problem. Women only train carriages being a testimony to how unsafe a place is for women rather than a triumphant safe place for women. Then there's the national crisis of plummeting birth rates (preceded by plummeting marriage rates), and the ageing population. Japan appears to be the first nation where women and men are losing interest in each other. For some reason I expect it will be rougher on the women than the men though.

Nerd World

Youtube has brought about a fascinating portal into a world that previously you either understood intuitively because you were a prt of it, or you didn't understand at all.

But now the observer can observe without fundamentally changing the environment. That world is nerd world. You can gaze on it via youtube clips called 'let's play'.

I didn't really stumble on nerd world by accident. Rather resentfully. What I as an artist was looking for was the mind numbing hours of entertainment videogames provide without needing my hands that were occupied with drawing.

The annoying thing was that these lengthy youtube playlists arent just screen capture recordings of people silently playing video games, but often come with the commentary of the nerds playing these games.

At first I felt like offering the advice I heard was often offered to non-comedian talk show guests, 'don't try to be funny'. I've written before that for me the defining character trait of nerds is a lack of imagination. Hence the draw to high fantasy epics and computer games and movies with lots of explosions and plot twists, because to the unimaginative a little entertainment goes a long way.

But I strongly suspect that an being easily surprised makes for a geat comedy crowd and really shitty comedians. (Scarily alt-comedy rooms may subsequently be able to feed off theselves)

So at first I was in pain but at a loss for reliably long sources of quality entertainment.

Eventually though, I began to appreciate being able to see the world through the prism of a nerd.

I'm sure many nerds have for example heard about Donald Trump's run for the gop ticket or the mike brown ferguson riots and other topical news stories. They may even have strong opinions about matters of social justice. But in nerd world, the decisions of blizzard game designers are actually important to their lives. The inclusion of characters in the street fighter 5 roster are worthy of debate.

Which isn't to say matters like these are important. They are in fact quite sad, and sadly unlikely to be improved by actual fans, just like fan fiction's greatest contribution to the world is 50 shades of grey.

But we are most judgemental of others when they remind us of ourselves, and it is what nerds can teach us about ourselves that makes the study of this human extreme worthwhile.

The ability to get emotionally invested in the completely trivial at the expense of a real and fascinating world around us is common to us all but exemplified by nerds.

I'm afraid though if you are having belly laughs to the commentary in-jokes of a lets play video there's probably no helping you.

The days that are hard

When you are in the zone, your muse is singing, you are experiencing the neurological state of flow, being an artist is easy.

The days that are hard are when you aren't. The work is sluggish and feels like actual work. And that's when you can just put your pen away as a hobbyist until you feel it again. But I think when you want the job you have to enjoy these hard days too. Work through them to set you up for more flow. Like running through your wall in a marathon.

Marry Well

A few hours ago I recieved a text from my motherto inform me she's coming home for her uncle's funeral. I expressed my condolences for this great uncle I'm not sure I met and then I recieved this backstory about her paternal grandmother's family not liking my own grandma.

My maternal grandparents were a mismatch. An unhappy marriage common in that day and age where divorces were unfortunately uncommon and furthermore came with dire economic consequences for mothers.

And yet to some extent I, two generations down, am paying for the mismatch.

I don't want to sound like one of those 'we gotta get the population down' dipshits whom are the grown up uneducated version of smarmy private school dipshits that argue the merits of totalitarianism, both of which have to be argued from the perspective of the least favored in the solution.

But I do wish we just removed the pressure to find a mate and have children in general. Not that I have problems with breeders, but that I have problems with settlers.

Looking about at your friends that tend to care about this shit, what do you observe? Broadly speaking people who do relationships tend to date 3-5 serious partners before marrying the last one.

In the breakups people do ask a lot of questions of the world and themselves, but do they carry this over to the hookups?

How common is it for a person to actively ask 'how is he similar to the last guy I dated?'

I'd say not common at all. Generally Tristan can be very similar to Trent, the crucial difference is that Tristan has a clean slate, he may have a history of cheating but he hasn't cheated on you (yet).

It's also not uncommon for the next partner to actually be the last partner. Is it more common, do you feel, for somebody to ask 'has Trent changed?' Or to say 'Trent has changed.'

And for that matter have you changed?

I pride myself on learning from past experience, though I'm not sure I am lsuccessful. But one thing I wont do for example, is date somebody because I can. This isn't to say I pursue unobtainable partners per se (though the result is largely the same) but that I won't ever again enter a relationship because someone is perfectly nice and into me and I do get lonely. That's not enough.

I've even learned from non-starter relationships what is now an article of faith for me - "wishing somebody would change is at the expense of the person who actually is that someone else." And that cuts both ways, I won't date somebody that gives me the impression they need me to be somebody else.

These though are lessons specific to my experience.

I watched the Big Bird documentary earlier today. I was touched many times over but he was a guy that had been married to both the wrong and right woman. Particularly touching was when he described crying inside the big bird costume as he was going through his divorce.

His children are rare exceptions, born into an unhappy marriage they were raised in a happy one and loved their stepmother.

I remember reading in 'How to Love' about histrionic personality disorder how histrionic make 'poor child rearers' and I think thats a good hueristic as to whether you're settling for a particulalry poor partner. Based on how they treat you and what you know of them, would you really put your child in their arms? Or are you hoping that parenthood will change them?

Maybe not. Earnestly, I don't know if people with low self-esteem for example, would be capable of having the double standard for their children. I don't know.

"Right now we could all be reading a book"

Not that I read.

But this line from the Boondocks cracked me up.

I like the Boondocks because it has almost nothing to do with the white man. When he does feature he'll be voiced by Samuel L Jackson, or he'll be a cruel punchline. Exploitative, mean and ignorant. A good enjoyable burn in other words, and I think in it's most sensitive and fair treatment of white racism, the Boondocks portrays accurately how little racists care.

Where it is great is on it's commentary of activism, where it has been itching a scratch of mine exacerbated in recent times by actually reading my facebook newsfeed.

I think more than any other series I've ever seen the boondocks demonstrates that there are morons on both sides of any debate, including the right side and they undermine actual progress.

Take the institutional racism in the American judicial system. Because african Americans are disproportionately convicted (and arrested, and probably advised to take plea deals) but the show satirize R Kelly's underage sex tape going to court and defense building a case around Kelly being a victim of racism.

Or having Martin Luther King Jr awake from a coma and criticize current bslack culture as being symptomatic of their oppression.

I cant really disect a show i couldn't write myself and could never execute. But I needed to see it.

My social network crowd is a progressive crowd, left leaning liberal bias. Thankfully most aren't activists (social media activists) and none so far as I'm aware are conspiracy nuts that worry about the gold standard being defunct and shit.

For example, you're on the right side of Australian history if you are pro marriage equality and pro meeting our human rights signatory status on asylum seekers.

But you are confused if you call yourself a 'real Australian' to welcome refugees. Or think it necessary to counter protest a protest people that aren't protesting any actual legislation, in a country that has already voted and ridiculed the one nation party out of existence. And you are confused if you applied the rainbow filter to your facebook profile picture and then bandy terms like Islamophobia around for people who are protesting sharia law.

Substitute

Thinking takes energy, so if you can avoid it your brain will. And hopefully that last sentence helps you avoid having to read Daniel Kahneman's very thorough book 'thinking fast and slow'.

One way we commonly avoid thinking is to use 'substitution' which is when faced with a difficult question that requires effort to answer, we substitute the question for an easier one and then use the answer to the easier question.

It's a really common mental habbit. And it conserves a lot if energy, furnishing us with 'good enough' think using 3.14 instead of the actual number of pi.

The most problematic substitution though are the hard questions, the example from the book was this:

How happy are you with your life over past 6 months?

How happy are you with your sex life over the past 6 months?

Presented in this order responses don't correlate, peoples consider each question, reverse the order suddenly the answers do correlate.

Sex life bad = overall life bad. Can do it with career as well.

What i feel i see is that this doesn't apply just to filling out questionnaires but when it comes to actually trying to solve the problems of what to do with our lives. Even though the moments may be just as fleeting, it translates to decisions and translates to actions.

Figuring out what will make us happy is a hard complex simultaneous equation with at least 6 variables to solve for anddealing in absract rather than concrete terms.

How to achieve happiness = hard. How to achieve status = easy.

At least the how to part.

Take any wayward 20 something and what advice is offered them? Go back to school and change career (or become a career academic), or just plain get a job. If the job isn't the obvious solution it'll be a relationship, specifically - get one. Or get laid depending onthe coothness of your vizier.

I'm not saying career and relationships aren't crucial components of happiness. Perhaps though that is why sex and money are the two main indicators of status.

A career that makes you happy winds up requiring a lot of things working in concert and money isn't necessarily going to be in the mix, let alone significant.

Sex may feature in your most important relationships, but it's unlikely to define over the long run. Conversation is. Again complicated.

But how many people in their internal lives carry a status objective as their priority?