The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Stef:

I thought Rossney's post started out well enough, but by the time he got to saying MJ was 'no longer really...human in any meaningful sense' and saying 'it feels strange to call him "a man"' I had serious problems. Human beings who are seriously damaged are still human beings. Men who are seriously damaged are still men. It's disrespectful to the damaged people and to the rest of us to deny this. It's also misguided, because it creates a false sense of otherness and a false sense of security, a sense that this sort of thing could not happen to real people. Well, it could and did.

[meta] All I can say is that this is going to make for one VERY LARGE BINGO BOARD when we're all through.

"I expected a group of [insert type of group here] folks to be [enlightened|loving|accepting|welcoming|more evolved]. But you people are a bunch of [unenlightened|hateful|rejecting|cliquish|troglodyte] [insert plural noun for male or female animal or genitalia here]."

When I see people talking smugly about how much they hate this family that spends $15K a month, I wonder how much people in areas much less well off than the US and Europe hate those of us who are living on, say, $30K-$100K per year.

A few days after I moved to Connecticut, the Hartford airport was damaged by a tornado. My fourth year there, I had heat stroke one summer. The next-to-last year I lived there, Hurricane Gloria flattened most of the trees on Sleeping Giant.

"When the Levee Breaks" and "Take Me to the River"

I just had a sleep study last night - I needed a pressure adjustment on my CPAP. I still have goo in my hair from where they attached wires to me.

The first time I got my CPAP (I didn't have a sleep study the first time round, they gave me an auto-calibrating one to use at home), I decided to lie down with the thing on just for 10 minutes to get used to it. Fortunately I had left the front door unlocked; an hour later, my sweetie came in and woke me up.

I like my octopus vacuum cleaner salesman.

A well known fantasy author's first work has a major character apparently named after a support group for the spouses of alcoholics. Made it damn hard for me to suspend my disbelief.

My high school girlfriends and I had fun with that. "And ifh you REALLY gesh in trouble, you can break open the elfshtones and DRINK them!"

I'm glad that the problem is solved, and I'm sorry it took so long to clear up. But I'm mainly here to express utter enjoyment of the phrase "slow loris territory," which I completely relate to due to various health problems of my own, and I suspect I will have many opportunities to steal^H^H^H^H^H pay tribute to it.

So that's where all those bizarre color names come from. I always wondered who had the enviable job of sitting around and thinking them up. I have a paint chip book that I sometimes read for amusement. Who knew that "ancient eye" is a particular shade of pale blue?

An excellent illustration of the truism that the perception of poverty is relative.

I agree with Ray - voting is necessary but ineffective and insufficient if I am not happy with the choices and I'm not doing anything to influence who and what gets presented to vote for. If I want to influence the direction of the political discourse and political decisions, I have to participate in organizing.

(Note, I find politics sufficiently distasteful that my only participation in organizing is giving money to large groups that support positions I agree with, and I think that's probably fairly ineffective...but more effective than voting.)

I'll also add that it's important political action to participate in discussions about politics and about what the world should be like. Otherwise no one will know what I believe and what I believe won't matter and I won't have an opportunity to learn from others and revise my beliefs.

In the US, sadly, one has to work pretty hard to find political discussions in which people are actually informed and in which more than one belief is represented.

Mr Ripley, that is what "actively refrain from voting" means: talk to people about why you're not going to vote. Make the notion of not voting for a political reason a part of the public discourse, present people with an alternative other than "not voting can only mean not caring." (I don't agree with the notion of not voting as a political protest, but I have some emotional sympathy with it. Then again, I regularly cast protest votes. I rarely vote for a major party candidate for US President. I suspect a lot of people consider my behavior one of a piece with the not-voting-Marxists.)

At least it was easy for me to commit civil disobedience on this one. I didn't even have to buy an almanac.

firecat.livejournal.com/226318.html

I will not attempt to send secret messages to my cat friends on the Internet by standing on my human's computer keyboard.sjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

Excellent post. I'd never heard the term Mary Sue before, but I've long noticed the wish-fulfillment aspect of fiction. The first time it really hit me was while reading John Fowles's Mantissa.

I'm suspecting some sexism in some applications of this concept, because it seems to me that there's a fine and mighty tradition of male authors writing heroic characters who influence the world beyond what seems likely for most people, and people seem to accept that as normal. But now that we have women writing such things (e.g., Laurell Hamilton), it's a bit more eyebrow-raising, eh? (I'm not suggesting that's the only angle on the Mary Sue phenomenon, but...)

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