For less than $20, You too can be Subversive.

I did this one with a paint brush. However, tomorow I plan to buy a squidgie, roller and fabric paint.
I'm taking orders now.

On the back, I'll print this logo. It's called "bad bunny". You can have that on the front if you like. I could draw you a hunter belonging to the hand or Xena, if that is your preference. I can also do "He treats objects like women" (in keeping with the anti-p0rn theme), if you're a TBL fan.

Some People Juggle Geese

Yesterday I would have said that I was hooked, pathalogically hooked on it. But about seven or eight episodes later, I think I'm the verge of saturation. I can feel it in my blood (I have two episodes left. Hopefully the "I'm sick of it" feeling and the "I'm going to kill myself because Firefly is over" feeling will coincide, thus cancelling each other out and leave me feeling normal and sane) But before that happens let me say a few words.

Love the dialouge. And the Cowboy meets future meets Chinese vibe. I like Kaylee, Jayne (does he remind anyone of Bobby North?), Mal (of course, but it's certainly not just a looks thing. He's a cool, confident, funny character), Walsh and the Shepheard. I don't like the following: Zoe is a bit dull, Inara is too prim and proper, Simon is weak and pathetic and I just wish Jayne had got to kill River. I have a secret longing (but Joss Wheden would have none of it) that Kaylee and Mal would get together, even though they do kinda have the father/daughter thing going on... it's a bit like how Eowyn and Aargorn should have got together, except the King of Middle Earth went and ruined it by marrying boring Arwen.

I have to remember though (and so I don't worship them), Mal and Walsh don't say the witty dialouge, Joss Wheden does. And he probably lies awake all night thinking it up. And he's probably 40 and fat and doesn't make eye contact with women.

Woo-hoo, I just got rid of the bain of my cyberkinetic existence... the "insert key"! Actually this is the second I've catapulted into the air today. Maybe I'll go around to the neighbours and fix their keyboard too. Hell, I'll do the whole street. Maybe I'll save the world from sentences upon sentences of swallowed up text!

I got a curling wand for Christmas

"There's no place that I can be...

...until I found Serenity."

I'm not selling out, but it has been a baptism of Firefly.

And Captain Mal certainly helps.

But you do have to be in I-want-to-escape mood. Which for me is most of the time.

Merry Christmas everyone! We had a big Family Clan Canival; turkey, salad, choc mint ripple cake and apple cider, Risk, mafia, poker, monopoly, laughs, jokes, discussion. Nineteen or so; parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends. Good times.

Brand Prowess

"Baby, I'm a Jobseeker"

So now I'm participating in a government-funded research project to test how low interview performance can be before they won't give you the job. I'm planning on trying different techniques, like being abrasive and over confident, or admitting that I'm good at BS-ing. Then I'll publish my sensationalised findings. And find employment in the proactive lack of it... Although reading about how much I suck at job interviews could get kind of boring after a while...

I probably need to get some perspective because I actually got excited about writing my first job application in my jobseeker diary.

I saw King Kong last night. Long must be Peter Jackson's style, since I found myself checking the time at least once. He did a couple of cheeky scenes that directly referred to his other work, especially The Two Towers. I liked the "medieval-esque monsters at the end of the world", Anne's character development and Jack Black's acting.

Fireflop

I just watched my second ever episode of Firefly. I didn't finish it. Now, I know it is close to many of my readers' hearts so I'll try not to offend you too much. I really wish I did like this Space Western. It has many right elements; space, Western and... the captain is hot.

But I get bored! Violence I don't understand, jargon filled dialouge I can't understand, too many names to remember, cheap girl on girl scene just for ratings, too much sitting around in cabins, contrived character interactions, poorly timed humour and why is Anara a hooker? Doesn't that make her character detestable? Even more so that she is elevated to the status of courtesan.

Give me Futurama any day.

Right in Our Own Eyes?

Today I did some manual labour. I like manual labour, or at least this kind. My parents are creating a "Tuscan" area on the east side of the house. I mean this in a totally non-kitsch way. Kitsch is anathema to our family (for future reference). I joked with dad that he needs to install a water feature, where the fountain is actually a little naked boy weeing. Or maybe dad needs to paint a niche on the wall. Anyway, dad needs to lower the patio, so it was my job to remove all its bricks and stack them. A repetative, physically strenous task in the sun, but I liked it. I like to ponder things, and make patterns in the way I remove the bricks.

As I was starting, dad came out of the house and he chatted with me about how the Italian precinct of the property would look. At that moment I felt like a paid labourer, and dad was the foreman, whom I was on good terms with so he would chat to me, even about things the mere labourer doesn't have to know. In an instant, the foreman turned back into dad. But for a moment, my dad felt like my boss.

I imagine if I told this to someone, they might reply "Oh, that's awful, that's bad." Or make some other normative judgement. It bothers me when people do that. For example, I might say "Guys with the waiter type personality can be intimidating." Someone, upon hearing, might jump to the conclusion that I don't like such guys, and would be suprised to find out that sometimes I like to be intimidated. They would be suprised because in responding to me, they have made a moral judgement. This judgment will probably be made according to their own lattice of moral understanding, and in making a judgment, they've assumed that I share it.

I don't think of things in such moral terms, so I don't understand why others suppose that I do.

I'm guilty of replying "Oh, that sucks" and imparting value judgments too. I think we all reply in such ways when someone has said something that we haven't really connected with or internalised, so the best way we think we can engage with them is to empathise lamely.

So, maybe when we say "that's good" and "that's bad" we don't really mean it, we're just making conversation. Either some of us carry around moral frameworks, or none of us really do. (Instead, we probably, at base, see the world causally, not normatively. For example, if you say, "I don't like X", you mean "X causes me to feel [some kind of pain]". Maybe. ) Maybe the only person who is lisenced to make such moral judgments is the one who pronounced the world "Good" when He made it.

Oh yass, I'm a Benefactor

Bron never posed this as a meme question, so it's possibly not theiving if I do...

"If you were a public benefactor, what would you bestow upon your city?"

Bron says: "Nick said he would make an awesome library. I couldn't decide between parks or an ecologically sound public transport system."

I commented: "A huge, underground maze with bike, walking and running tracks, plus security (with a good sense of direction!) to keep things safe."

This maze would also include food, water and tiolet stops. Maybe it would even be multilayerd to further confuse people (and make it more exciting!) There would perhaps be themed sections (not too tacky), but these would be repeated so that the maze wouldn't be too easy. But there wouldn't be any nasty booby-traps like on The Cube.

What would you bestow?

Family Photo

It is possible that I am not adopted.

Self Portrait

The Borg On Marrying Young

Now, I know some of my readers married young. What I am about to say is not a judgment on them, so please don't take offense at what I say, it's not aimed at you, at all. That said, I'm going to be shamelessly perscriptive (and ironic), but that's okay - it's not like I'm the Moral Implimentor.

As we all know, there are pressures on the young in Christian circles to give into their desires and marry since they are "burning with passion". So there will be some lusty young man who can't control himself, chooses a girl because "she's hot" (single, and a Christian) and gets married without further consideration.

He soon discovers that marriage is tough. His wife has many unlovable qualities. Since he married thinking that the only important characteristic of marriage was sex, he neglected to choose someone whom he could talk to, share with and be a companion to. He didn't realise that his wife needs to be kept happy in more than one way. He thought, "it's only about sex right? The other stuff is easy." Since her husband is not meeting her needs, and is a thoughtless kinda guy, she fails to respect him. Ergo the couple has a rubbish marriage. He doesn't love her (only lusts her) and she doesn't respect him.

A further problem might occur if he's a smart kind of guy, but his wife is a bimbo. He'll eventually get bored of her, and meet attractive intelligent women at, say, church whom he does not tire of. Even if he doesn't have an affair with such a woman, he might commit adultry with them in his heart, and lead them astray too.

But, Shyborg, you say, we're talking about Christians here. Surely Christians would be compelled to work at their marriages, and even after the mistake of marrying for lust would try to know their spouses? I reply, yes they would. But at what cost? Might this be what St Paul refers to when he says marriage takes one away from being concerned with the Lord to being filled with one's spouses concerns? Why make life hard for oneself, when all that energy (poured into a relationship) could be used for serving God outside of marriage?

I'm not saying don't get married. But I do say marry someone with great consideration. Think about all aspects of your relationship, and think of the gaps that someone else might end up filling. And I don't think I'm being idealistic in reccomending that a Christain waits a while until someone really suitable and worthy comes along, someone who is easy to love/respect. Before I tell show that this is possible, let me address a possible objection:

What if a young couple is burning with passion? Should they not get married? Here I will perhaps be harsh. To answer this objection I ask: What is that led them to be in such a state? Were they being sexually impure whilst going out? Were either parties feeding their sexual desires, and so priming themselves for lust? So much of our sexual immorality is the result of comprimise, a whoring of ourselves with the sexual expectations of popular culture and the world. If we want to be serious about sexual purity, we have to be worried about more than just p0rn.

Case study: I've had the privledge of getting to know a slightly older Christian couple. We'll call them Al and Lou. At first glance they seem like an unlikely pair. She's a tall Anglo, he's short and Asian. She was late 20's, and he early 30's when they got married. Late for Christians. However, my respect for them increases the more I get to know them. You can tell that they are truely in love. They flirt and tease each other, and they treat each other beautifully. He's hilarious, intelligent and bold. She is gentle, wise and witty. They are both other person centered. She says that every morning they have to spend at least an hour deep in discussion, to "catch up". It's clear that through their marriage, they have brought out the best in each other.

The Borg on Sex and Gender

Could people stop mismarrying please?

Like, if you're fluidly intelligent, idiosyncratic and love books, don't marry a bore! Don't marry her because she's "hot". Don't marry him because "he'll do".

Please excuse the outburst. If I don't have any control over the events of other people's lives, the least I can do is rant about it. ;-)

In other news, my theorising tendencies have led me to a few hypotheses (not theories) about sex and gender. I'm not clinging to these dearly (if I did, you would be right in calling me paranoid), I'm just throwing them out there for you to refute. And (surely this qualifier is redundant) they're generalisations.

1 Because I am a young, blonde female, people (especially older males) will not take me seriously in debate. It is not that they do this intentionally, it is a prejudice resulting from social conditioning. They will either placate me with sloppy refutation or without argument, or they will realise that their stereotypes are being destroyed, so that they will find me as threatening as a male. In this latter case, they will be particularly aggressive.

2 Men don't take women's sexuality seriously, and perhaps either they implicitly assume women have no desires, or that their desires are inconsequential. Men like it if women are interacting sexually. However, if these women are interacting in such a way, the men don't conclude that these women are lesbians. They're not "written off" as lesbians, and so out of the man's league. Instead, these women are still considered by the man to be "fair game", because he does not take the woman's sexuality or sexual desires seriously. If men engage in homosexual behavior, they are immediately defined by others as homosexual, and their preferences are not subject to change (pending a woman able to "turn them"). This is because people take the sexuality of men seriously.

3 In mixed groups, women prefer to listen in on conversation between two men, than the conversation between women. Perhaps they find the conversation more interesting. Perhaps, and this is a bit sordid, it is akin to men enjoying watching two women make out. Women don't like watching two men make out, but maybe they enjoy listening to the conversation between two men (assuming the men are having a somewhat profound and personal conversation). I don't like this hypothesis so much because I'm employing ideology I don't even agree with.