Harpsdiscordia

I think it's the little tennant head flick when he's emphasising a word that makes it.

...I'd accidentally started on this random urban fantasy novel ("accidentally" and "random" in the sense that I've been kinda busy and trying to squeeze in some pony fics just to keep myself writing regularly BUT THEN I went and wrote a few thousand words of first chapter: wtf brain?!?) which has this weird as fuck metaphysics underpinning it (I think my brain just flat out went "okay, all that Unknown Armies stuff from years back? And all those deconstructive thoughts you've had while reading the Dresden file books? Fucking move that all out of here so I can make room for new stuff NAOW" I await those killer swarms of featuses working themselves into this somehow).

Which was when two great ideas slammed together, which were:

1) Thriller is awesome, and obviously the modern uniform of a necromancer would be the red and black leather thriller jacket/trouser combo (and the thriller dance would make a good calibrative test of the necromancer's control of his undead minions.

2) Hey why don't I have the final battle be between the white supremacist guy at the head of an army of racist zombies (skin heads and black shirts and teddy boys oh my!) dredged from the depths of London's history of interracial conflict, and the "wicked" "witch of the north" donning the thriller jacket and dancing up a spectral army of every normal person who got killed by the sort of bastards on the other side?

Which meant that I had a very simple to write sequence in which an an ethnic female british and NOT FUCKING STUPID version of harry dresden defeats racism by doing the thriller dance – with the key to this sequence being that the dancing and descriptions of the physical and spiritual manifestations of the vast magical powers being wielded is interspersed with what amounts to an African-American History essay regarding the social-racial-political context surrounding Micheal Jackson's early rise to stardom as a pop rather R&B or Soul musician (though We'll see if I don't truncate it the fuck down into something far less deep than I'm making it sound when I get round to editing it into the bulk of the novel itself).

So I went to youtube to start rewatching the Thriller video to get the steps of the actual dance right and the pacing and structure of it all...



...did it always have a bit at the beginning where two black people are totally drssed in the universally recognizable uniform of the preppy white teenagers from a cheezy all white 50's B-Movie?

Damn, I thought I was totally stretching the extent to which racial politics was present in the video quite a bit to make it into this weird magico-racial fulcrum/focus for this scene. But nope, apparently there was more than enough there in the source material all along, quite explicitly so in fact.

Son, I am disappoint.

Once upon a time you chose "don't be evil" as the motto for you hegemonizing corporate swarm, and we laughed and fell in love with you a little, felt that you were a useful check and balance against your fellow hegemonizing corporate swarm Microsoft. Because we thought you got the joke with us, that when we talk about Microsoft being "evil" we really meant that M$ is fucking stupid: IE was a creature borne of a belief that building a working web browser was less important than just building a web browser as quickly as possible with as little aforethought as you could get away with, leading to a program that was the software equivalent of just smashing your hard drive with a big rock.

It's stupidity that was the problem, the same goes for Clippy and Microsoft Bob, the memory creep problem in XP, every little annoying and pointless pop up warning, every click through needed to even see the contents of our hard drives, and the eldritch abomination spoken of by that furious arab Abdul Alhazred in the Necronomicon as "VISTA". Stupid stupid and stupid again were each and every mistake, and suffice to say that with enough of these stupid moments, the average windows user started to take the little stupidities that M$ threw at us personally, started to view them as "evil".

And in a way the reason why we thought you got the whole evil/stupid dichotomy was because for the most part your products have been well made, the algorithms generally well thought out; the code efficient.

Except there's been quite large holes in that perception of late – there's the mild annoyance that you've shifted to a policy of having google giving the results for the more commonly used spelling for a term, rather than the original system for error correction where you'd show me the results for what I actually typed and give me a single quite click away from a possibly more likely term – which might sometimes be the correct spelling for what I meant to type, but often wasn't.

This is stupid.

Then we had the Google Buzz fiasco, where you had this preconceived notion of how people would want to use an existing service which they used in a very specific way. And the Algorithms involved in that were well made from a strictly technical stand point, the code was still efficient.

But it was stupid.

Now we have this G+ bullshit. Not just the mass deletion of people's G+ account AND the various other bits of Google related cloud services, but shit like Warren Ellis complains about here regarding the automatic importing of new contacts when you set up a new account. All the problems involved this time are the result of complex and technically well written algorithms and coding that (like with Buzz and the googel searches) you've implemented in G+ in an effort to (like Microsoft Bob) make using your products "easier".

But it's really really stupid, and it's precisely the same sort of stupid that cropped up the last couple of times as well, and that stupidity is specifically this:

You are good at writing algorithms, you are a genius at coding, but Google; you don't seem to get that your algorithms and code are far too stupid to ever grasp the vexities and complexities of the human heart.

After all, what would a mere algorithm know about the love of a parent for their child which, in their postpartum glow, leads to them giving their children weird names like Moonshine Sparkle Bunny or William Shatner? What would a code, no matter how sublimely written and free segfaults, know of the angst and pathos of affection turned sour and the hate and recriminations that can lay between seperated couples? How many of the databases underpinning your cloud operations ever even kissed a woman? I would bet none of them.

Google, to keep to your motto, you have to understand that it's not merely enough to be "not evil", it's not enough to be full conversant with current versions of java, python, XML and CSS sheets:

You must also be smart enough to be fully fluent in the scripting language of the human heart; aware of the all too human foibles and multi-faceted yearnings that make us who and what we are rather than the limited spread sheet boxes that you wish to fit us into, and smart enough to realise that we can never be anything else but what are, and will never fit into the algorithmically simple boxes you have constructed for us.

And until you understand that, you will be both stupid and evil and your hegemony will continue to be limited, because without love you cannot grasp the magic of friendship which allows us to act as groups and become greater than the mere sum of our parts.

Welp, looks like I'm running out of room, Best wishes to you and the subsidaries, yours Sincerely,

Fridgepunk.

Shorter Keith "SaruMander" Mander:

Little fanfic, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee read
By the archive and o’er the feed;
Gave thee shipping of delight,
hobbit shipping, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little fanfic, can I buy thee?
I would like to monetize thee?

Unfortunately fandom's response was not supportive, even after he explained that he was a decent guy!

I do love fandom sometimes. NEVER CHANGE (unless it is into a collection of accurately coloured pony toys)

So to further rip William Blake a new one:

Fandom fandom. Burning bright,
On the servers of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could pay thy fearful server costs?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine ships?
To what kink dare they aspire?
What the hand, dare fap the fire?

And what fic, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread baby hand? & what dread feet?

What the whip? what the chain,
In what gutter was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their keyboards
And water'd comments with their tears:
Did they smile their work to see?
Did they who made the fanfic make thee?

Fandom fandom burning bright.
On the servers of the night:
What immortal hand or eye.
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Little really needs to be said about the wank proper.

However.( Read more... )

TL;DR: BMArse Turing-test-failing-motherfucks can lick my delicate feminine ballsack. ALSO: I am more angry about this than I thought I was.

ATTENTION BRONIES & DWARF FORTRESS PLAYERS

THERE IS A MY LITTLE PONY MOD FOR DWARF FORTRESS

SLAVES TO CELESTIA: MY LITTLE FORTRESS (warning for tangential discussions about the correct pluralisation of "pegasus")

THIS IS AWESOME IN SAUCE FORM.

ALLCAPS BECAUSE "BECAUSE", SEE ALSO; "ZOMGWTFBBQ".

Imagine a time when everything is either a stick or a rock, and beyond this you had the spirited (past tense adverbal form of "spirit") critters around you, of which you may or may not be a part of because Pan Narratis, the narrative ape, like its fucking dichotomies due to a genetical tendency to wander into open fields with sticky-uppy erections during thunder storms.

The English have been fucking animals since time began, since probably the moment when the great unfuckable object of the wooly mammoths finally died backed and the omnifucking force of paleolithic humanity was finally able to sweep across the anglo-french landbridge of doom, set foot upon this green and sceptered isle one warm winter evening, and were finally able to stick a heron's beak up their arse without being tusked to death by hairy 8-ton puritan mammoth cockblockers.

Here's what we know:

We know that the paleolithic (means "ancient stone tool using period" or some such – we're the early to mid-paleoelectronic in the context of any future archeologists reading this *waves*) had stone dildos, not the fearsome ginormous things that most of the news stories depict them to be actually, slightly smaller in size than most contemporary pocket sized vibrators when you see them in the context of someone's hand rather than zoomed the fuck in (Teh News seems to have hit some "Lithotechnological Dildos: Threat or Menace" Semantic-Brainfart angle when processing and displaying pictures of the damn thing).

¿'_'?

Though who knows, time and mechanical force might have reduced them somewhat in size over time. After all I've yet to see the damn things put into a socio-cultural context – were they for personal use only or were they handed down from mother to daughter or around the village and The Communal Dildo of The Spirit Trees on the Planes of O? And thus given to being at least vaginally weathered over many generations, like those ancient stone diases and thrones that have been in use for so long as the literal seat of power for so many empires that the arsemarks of literally countless pharaohic dynasties have worn themsleves deep into their surfaces?

How big were the stone-wangs to begin with? Could they be seen from space? Did Ancient Astronauts Build These Stone-Wangs? (E. Daniken 1975, Twatfinch Press, London)

¿'_'?

But think about this: We have dildos, widely accepted cultural artifact right?

Where are the stone fleshlights? Oh, I don't mean proper man portable stone fleshlights (which would pose some major structural and technical difficulties to produce using stone age technology), but where are the "stones that have been carved into something just tight enough that a dick can get some masturbatory rubtion off of the stone cavity"? They probably would have been carved directly into rock faces, and maybe the really fancy ones would have some system so that they could be heated up using hot embers placed inside the vagolith without burning anyone's bell-end.

less sophisticated ones, probably largely in Greece, would have used the body from multiple people using the bloody things to give it a bit of warmth, or in other more practical and less "pain is the great teacher of MEN!!!!! (in bed)" places (and like the Lithodildo) they would have felt their chaps warm enough when the vagolith was filled with boiling hot molten animal fat.

Of course these would face problems that the lithodildo wouldn't face as far as erosion is concerned, being more likely to be left exposed to the elements, and being unable to fall into some nice preservative sedimentary deposit, as well as being next to impossible to find by archeologists unless conveniently located near a major and well preserved cave artist site that some filthy spelunker happens to trip across and tell an archeology department about.

But here's the thing: where in the intervening kilo-millenia (AKA MYa to those in the know) did the fucking fleshlight go? Dildos pop up (sometimes literally) all over later technological epochs, in bronze, iron, steel, wood (medieval europe – yeah, technically an iron working culture but really it was mostly a wood working culture; longbow, halberd, most of the major military technological advances of the past 1000 years in europe have rested on people finding various uses for different kinds of wooden stick where previous and contemporary cultures skipped straight to doing everything in the metal/alloy that defined the period. Asia was a bit like this with bamboo but mostly during periods when complicated metallurgy was restricted in some fashion).

All are various materials used to make dildos over the millenia, but show me the bronze fleshlights of Alexandria! Display to me your wooden vagina of Olde London Towne! You fucking can't, because the thing about technology, like evolutionary, is that while things will be repeatedly redeveloped and recreated over time, NOTHING IS INEVITABLE!

When the Romans came to Scotland they met the bloody picts and immediately freaked out worse than Lovecraft did when he got to New York City and saw some turn of the century interracial porn for the first time! You why? because the Picts wore Trousers, a concept that so boggled the mind of the poor miniskirt wearing roman legionnaires that most plucked their eyes out with their own gladiolas and legged it back towards the channel ASAP.

Skip forward to today and what is the fucking notable element of Scottish national dress? the fucking Kilt! In fact you'd think that with the receding of the roman empire, the trousers would have fallen down around the ankles of the miniskirt wearing blokes of dark age England but instead what we find is that the concept of trousers didn't reenter the mindscape of the british isles until the fucking 17th century! Which is why words like "tights" and "trousers" and indeed the American "pants" are all pluralised, all the concepts began life as individual leg tubes when the concept of individual leg coverings popped up again at the end of the dark ages, and it took until england had beheaded a few kings and reinvented the concept of standing armies before someone got the idea of joining the leg tubes up at the crotch so that everyone's nuts weren't just flapping about any more.

You know the canterbury tales? All those blokes telling tales have their scrotums resting directly on the backs of the donkeys they're riding because no one had thought to actually cover their nadgers up yet in a country that is renowned for being cold and windy.

technological progress, and hence the future because we now think of one as the other these days (though they're fucking not) is not a thing going up, or forward, it's just something that occurs, with no real motive bloody force.

unless you set down and decide to be a motive bloody force for progress. Change is good when the change is good, shut up about your fucking jet pack, put your genitalia away and wash out your fleshlight young man! Make the future move forward, because it's not going to do it on its own

It's 5:30 am and I'm supposed to have been doing something productive and/or sleeping rather than typing stream of conciousnesses (for I have many! One for each lobe of my mighty fractal 4D brain!) and listening to super pony beats on a constant loop.

GOOD NIGHT, GOOD MORNING AND GOOD LUCK

Ben Brown: "But did you say anything or throw anything that might have made the police view you as a threat?"

Jodi McIntyre: "Do you really think that a person with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair could pose a threat to police who are armed and armoured?"

Seriously, the BBC asked a person who had explicitly already mentioned that he cannot move his own wheel chair if he threw something at police, and suggested that he might have been "rolling towards" the policeline, which is about a hundred yards away, and therefore have seemed like a threat that justified being dragged across concrete.

Of note is that if you watch the larger video over at the BBC, watch at 00:28, where you can see one of the police officers who attacked Jodi being pulled away by his jacket by other police officers in the classic "leave him terry he's not worth it!" motion generally reserved for the mates of drunk idiots who've started a fight in a pub.

Ben Brown is of course the reporter who asked protesters on thursday "why are you starting fires? What does that achieve?" to which multiple protesters had to try to explain the concept of it being cold, in parliament square on an unusually cold december evening.

There is at least one petition going round asking for Ben Brown to apologise for his disgraceful behaviour, though emails and phone calls to the BBC would also be nice.

I can't see Assange facing a great deal of injustice in the Swedish courts, I can see him easily experiencing due process of law, and having all his human rights respected at all points of this affair. If he is found guilty, he will find himself in a prison where he will again have all his human rights respected by the institution he'll be incarcerated in, and he will not have to stay there particularly long once appeals are taken into account because he's only been charged with rape, not something with a particularly long sentence.

Whatever the hell he does for wikileaks will not actually be affected – one of the side effects of his constantly moving about is that whatever he does can still be done remotely from prison. The worst case scenario that can result from him being arrested isn't exactly bad.

So while the fact that Interpol considers Assange's arrest as big a deal as that of convicted child rapist Roman Polanski is undeniable bullshit, and while the attacks on Wikileaks are wrong, none of this is actually a genuine injustice.

There are far too many people in prison and who have suffered worse than prison as a result of genuine injustices, like having confessions either falsified or extracted under torture, or due to falsified evidence put up against them, or of racist police supported by racist judges and racist jurors obtaining convictions for such injustices.

Found an interesting little flickr photostream that has a few neat pictures in it:( pictures and commentary below the cut... )

And no, I don't know what a heat light is either, but I do know that it must make surreptitiously taking photographs of people armed with eggs less easy. Though it probably smells delicious. Mmm... eggs and bacon...

You know what: I Love this country today. Genuinely Love it in a way that I doubt the nationalists like Moon or Clameron or Merkel would ever grasp, for their country is a jealous country, that must be worshipped but never truly loved; because it's a thing above the people and not a thing of the people, and thus those mere weak and fragile person must fear it and placate and make excuses for it during its abusive episodes.

And I will always and especially love My City for its variety, and all the honesty and beauty that that variety instils in it. I miss you so much London, you evil fucking bitch. Keep doing that thing you do so well.

Dear Former Bullington Club Member David Cameron,

I know you, like many changelings, experience troubles when it comes to communicating via the expiration of air through a larynx, used as you are to communicating via the great link. And I know that, obviously, the various words used to describe experiences conveyed via the limited senses of us solids outside of the great link can be a bit tricky to get right.

At the same time this does not really excuse you declaring that you could;

"see a line, a thin blue line of extremely brave police officers, trying to hold back a bunch of people who were intent on violence and destruction.

"They were very brave those police officers, but as the police themselves have said there weren't enough of them and the police response needs to reflect that, so I'm very glad that the Met Police commissioner has said what he said."

For starters, you were in china, distant from the protests by several thousand miles. While I get that the senses of solids can be confuddling to one more used to the great link they do not convey fucking omniscience, nor was there any live feeds regarding the protests on the telly.

So no, Former Bullington Club Member David Cameron, you did not "see" a "thin blue line" (should be "dayglow yellow streak" btw), any more than you "saw" this streak of yellow "try" to "hold back" a bunch of people who were intent on violence.

here is a picture to emphasise what I'm saying:( edumacational picture below the cut, WARNING: may contain photojournalists )

So please excuse me if I refuse to find the idea of vandalism very shocking, and excuse me if I am unable to congratulate the police on "doing" a "tough job".

Because "arresting students for doing illegal things" is not a hard job, and it's not even a job they've actually done, and it seems that the best place to be at a protest and the best activity to engage in at one, if one's sole wish is to not be arrested, is to be involved in the bit of the protest that engages in the most reprehensible acts, as protesting peacably in a way that involves you violating no laws will ensure arrest while the obligate kitten felchers who plant explosives beneath parliament after setting fire to her majesty's ships while they're in dock who are holding ten foot wide signs displaying signed confessions to said acts of treason, arson, terrorism and animal abuse on them, some how are rendered beyond the reach of law.

Maybe to a former member of the bullington club such an out and out inversion of what constitutes the police's legal duty as policeofficers looks like a good thing.

You are wrong.