Parents Who Hid Child’s Gender for Five Years Now Face Backlash
When Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper had their son, Sasha Laxton, five years ago, they decided that rather than make a big splashy “It’s A Boy!” announcement, they’d keep the news to themselves. Instead, they only told a select number of relatives that little Sasha was a he; to everyone else the child was referred to as “the infant” and described without gendered pronouns. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge …
Unnecessary Redundancy
One of my pet hates is redundant language; I reserve the right to “really truly” for emphasis if I want to, but all that “05-hundred AM in the morning” stuff is for cock jockeys.
Here’s a little visual celebration of redundancy in action:
I'd prefer to prepay afterwards, by Andrew Sardone
Redundant Touch by JulianBleecker
Stating the Obvious by Hryck
Redundancy by mlcastle
Images via Flickr: Andrew Sardone, JulianBleecker, Hryck, mlcastle
Related resources
- Writing tips and blogging job opportunities (invisiblogger.com)
- Redundancy Explains Junk DNA, Redundancy Explains Junk DNA (sandwalk.blogspot.com)
- Tighten up your writing by removing redundant/unnecessary words (cybertext.wordpress.com)
Image of the Week: Win A Dream Holiday
My mate posted this on Facebook. I thought this was ironic due to the fact this paper came out only a couple of days after the Costa Concordia tragedy happened (on Friday 13th January, woo00ooo), and just above the photo of the sinking cruise ship they’ve got a big red headline offering to win a dream holiday. Mmm, I think not. I wonder if they got in trouble for this ?
***** 4nim4l *****
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Related articles
- Image of the Week: Window disclaimer by Karen Neoh (machiavelliid.com)
- Cruise ship’s plan posted on Facebook before disaster (vancouversun.com)
Gun sales banned for Xbox Live Avatars
I’ve just found out on OXM online that the Gears of War Lancer and Hammerburst avatar items are no longer available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Apparently a new policy came into effect for all gun-like avatar accessories on the Xbox Live Marketplace from January 1, 2012.
If you’ve already bought guns for your avatar, you should still have those, but it looks like you won’t be getting any more. What a load of bollocks!
I am an adult Xbox 360 gamer and I don’t see the point of this ban. They put age limits on these gun games so why don’t they have the age limit thing on the avatar items if it’s that much of a problem? That way the people who don’t want their children playing around with TOY guns will be able to stop their kids’ avatars holding pictures of guns too. Lol.
I have six children and think it’s fair enough people don’t want their kids thinking its OK to play with real guns. Some parents think it’s bad to play with toy guns too. It’s not real when you play these GAMES. I mean come off it what’s next, are they going to ban kids from playing with toy guns and water pistols at all hmmm?
At the end of the day the avatars are only pictures and it’s safe to say kids have seen pictures of guns before, all over the place. And if they can still see guns on some Xbox Live avatars, given that guns already bought won’t be taken away, then what’s the point?
Army ads show men with guns all the time and show them as heroes – kids see that on TV all the time completely independent of anything Microsoft might do. I personally support the military because they’re sacrificing a lot to protect us, but if seeing pictures of people with guns is so bloody bad for kids, then surely everyone should stop advertising that way? Don’t be daft.
I’ve got a poster on our wall at home of Call of Duty characters holding guns and I don’t believe it does any psychological harm to my kids to see that piece of artwork. BIG DIFFERENCE between real life and games, BIG DIFFERENCE between interactive games and pictures.
***** 4nim4l *****
Related articles
- OXM story: Report: Gun sales to be illegal for Xbox Avatars starting New Year’s Day.
- Marvel Releases Superhero Items To Xbox Live Avatar Marketplace (splashpage.mtv.com)
- Xbox Live Avatar Marketplaces gets tattoos (vg247.com)
Image of the Week: Window disclaimer by Karen Neoh
There are a lot of things I like about this. First of all, I’m just happy that somebody bothered to make up some nice professional looking signage rather than just writing it on a piece of paper taped to the window. That restores my faith in the quirked priorities of humanity.
I also like the fact that their offer of a puppy goes some way to ameliorate the threat to give children strong caffeine beverages. And look, if you don’t want the kids to drink espresso then don’t leave them unattended, right?
You can see more of Karen’s photos on Flickr.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you prefer. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
If your dad’s got a motorbike then you win, even if your dad is ginger.
This is pretty much how I remember the logic of comparing and competing about our parents when I was a kid.
I remember my sister telling people her dad was a strong man. I told him this and he said she was right. She meant like in a circus though, with a fancy mustache and tight leopard print pants with the fashioned-in braces.
I’m only thinking about all this because we went with the Animal to visit some of his other kids yesterday and I was reminded of how important it is, at a certain age, to be able to brag about your family and especially your parents.
Let’s not let them down, eh.
Productivity: How to crush procrastination for good
Here are 5 concepts I’ve discovered that can make a disorganised and lazy grunt like me a bit more efficient:
1. Procrastination isn’t a problem, it’s a solution
But a very poor one. Every bit of time and energy you spend finding ways and means to put things off is a piece of your life that you will never, ever get reimbursed. If this is your solution to things you don’t enjoy or things that scare you, you’re fucked. So, here’s how to remove procrastination from your life.
2. Do the stuff you hate first
The more you put off something that you don’t feel like doing, the more you realise that it can be put off, the more the world shapes itself to your laziness. It’s like a huge vacuum cleaner made of memory foam, sucking your will to live and get on with shizzle. So get up, do it while your procrastinating synapses are still half-asleep, and you won’t have to put it off anymore.
3. Or, don’t do it at all
Does it really need doing? Does it really need you and no-one else to do it? Because, you know, if you’ve been getting away with not doing it so far, then maybe that’s your solution. Just openly don’t do it; no procrastination there. If it must be done, ask someone else to do it for you. Pay them if it saves you from having to procrastinate.
4. Do something else first
Wait, isn’t that procrastination? Nope.
If you purposefully decide that you will do undesirable task X at a certain time, but first have a scheduled appointment with something more enjoyable, that’s called planning. Thoughtful planning will leave you feeling energised and calm when you tackle your task X.
5. Stop smoking (yes, I will, I will)
If you smoke, say 20 cigarettes a day at 5 minutes each, you’re wasting 100 minutes every day. If you also spend 5 minutes walking outside and back each time, that’s 200 minutes a day. More than 3 hours, every single day, spent on something expensive that’s killing you. That’s more than 50 DAYS a year you could have spent thinking, working, or carrying out vital maintenance on yourself (yes, you have to eat, sleep and shit to remain productive; showering helps too).
Maybe I’m on a wrong ‘un here, but it seems to me that if you can find ways to remove the procrastination from life, then you can fill all the time you were going to spend wasting time with something a bit more exciting. Thoughts?
Image credit: ronocdh
Related articles
- Completely Relevant News: It’s Not Procrastination (Really!) (wins.failblog.org)
It’s been a fucking riot. You twats.
Yesterday we heard there was a tiny attempt at a mob looting in our overpopulated suburban town centre. This may have something to do with the recent riots in Tottenham and outwards, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that too many people in this town and others are bored, sulky twats who think the world owes them a living just for existing.
Harsh? Only a bit.
True? Listen, I used to be one of those bored sulky twats. I know what I’m talking about.
I wouldn’t have started a riot, but I can remember watching the Rodney King riots in LA on my TV screen and thinking something along the lines of “hell yeah”. Before I grew up, I saw it differently – rioters were righteous, the authorities unjust, oppressive and reactionary. I assumed this unless it was explicitly shown to be otherwise. Because I was a twat.
Before I grew up, I threw rocks [small ones! pebbles! but I still did it] at another kid in a riverbed, just because the other kids from school were doing it already. He was an unpopular kid. The thought of what we did makes me sick now, but at the time I did it without thinking. Because I was a child and a bit of a twat.
The problem isn’t that riots get started by a group of angry people whose tempers have frayed to hell. The problem is that riots are propagated by further groups of people who see a chance for a creepy admixture of depersonalised retribution and entertainment.
You are thoughtless wankers. You’ve burned homes, taken lives, and stolen from an economy that’s already been fucked every which way. And it’s not just you. Almost every talking head and chav-on-the-street has annoyed me with their general lack of a proper grasp on the situation. The world hates your face. All of you.
You’ve stood in front of TV cameras braying about respect and shitty policing [riot supporters] or social deprivation and lack of opportunity [middle-class think-gooders] or criminal gang culture and appropriate response weapons [politicians have been far less supportive of domestic rioting than they were of recent violent uprisings on the other side of the world].
The Animal asks me, if the rioters had a problem with the government then why didn’t they go to attack the government? And I tell him,
*sigh* Because they haven’t got a problem with the government, they’ve got a problem with everything that isn’t them and theirs. Frequently got problems with those, too.
*double sigh* Because they don’t in fact know where the fuck to find “the government”. Most of them have never attempted political action of any kind before. Many of them are, however, familiar with fighting and breaking shit up to relieve tensions and resolve disagreements in subcultural politics.
We’re all tired. I’ve got a cold [this has nothing to do with anything, really, but adds to my overall feeling of impatience and weariness]. Just stop being complete fucking idiots and fuck off home, yeah?
Related articles
- The Psychology Of A Rioter (huffingtonpost.com)
- British PM Misses Point of Social Media, Threatens Ban (readwriteweb.com)
The problem with “free”
For a month or 2 (OK, maybe more – my sense of time is hazy when I’ve been procrastinating hard) I’ve been the proud owner of a free .co.cc domain name and free 000webhost.com hosting. I haven’t made any good use of it, but it’s sucked up a fair amount of my time: checking to see if the registration had been activated, requesting activation, waiting, checking to see if the nameservers had been updated yet, waiting, twitching, reading the support resources, visiting the non-existent site to will it into being with my steely gaze, emailing support and waiting a week for a reply.
All I wanted it for was to poke around: instal WordPress.org, play with themes and stuff, test things I wasn’t sure about before I did them anywhere important. I didn’t see any point paying for something I was only going to use for fun and exploration. D’oh.
Top quality fun and exploration are well worth paying for. I wouldn’t say “oh, I’ll only ever use free sex toys because they’re just for fun,” or decide that my walking shoes have to be free because I’ll only use them to explore. So why was I focused on getting my test on for free?
Because the internet’s sposed to be free, yo.
No.
In the end I got pissed off and paid about £20 of our quaint English pounds to some guys online in exchange for a year’s hosting package that’s probably a lot higher-spec than I need, and includes a free .com domain name registration. I didn’t compare web hosting prices and find the best deal, I didn’t ask all my self-hosting friends for recommendations. Shit, I didn’t even tweet for help.
I just got bored bored bored of the dicking around with this free stuff and decided I was happy to pay someone who would do it a little bit faster and better; then I paid the first people I googled who looked… faster and better. And they were. I still had to live chat with a techie about getting my domain registration arranged, but that was quick and painless and live, dammit, so I wasn’t left frustrated and grouchy.
Oh, my aching internet-addicted bones.
I’m not saying all free stuff is bad; I have some excellent free or “freemium” stuff that I’m very happy with and whose support service is actually quite supportive. But I don’t want to embrace the false economy of saving money by doing everything myself, when my time is worth more than the fee for assistance.
So this morning I looked at my situation and grokked this: I could spend a few hours messing with my new setup and export-importing all my content and adding plugins and dancing with widgets. Or I could spend some cash and have my new site set up for me. I’d been intending to do it all myself, to benefit from the learning implicit in any new activity. But I realised the knowledge to be gained is largely “how to point and click”, and I’m pretty sure I could pick it up whenever if I needed to. So again, I’d rather spend a little cash and save the hassle than spend the time (when I could be earning money or chilling with my family) to do it myself.
Problem solved through the application of cash. So if you have cash, great – your takeaway is to spend more of it on saving yourself for the good stuff. If you don’t have cash, that sucks and I’m on my way. Leave me a comment (or email me) about who you are and what you’re doing for money; I’ll get back to you and help if I can.
Image credit: Gisela Giardino
Shh… Even sleeping babies can hear you’re unhappy
You know those times when you’ve argued, wept, or otherwise stressed out while your baby was sleeping? Turns out if a baby can hear you, it still knows how you feel.
fMRI scans of sleeping babies aged from 3 to 7 months show activity in the middle temporal gyri, right lingual gyrus and medial frontal gyri when human voice sounds including crying, laughter and other neutral noises were played to them. Basically that’s the same as you’d expect to see in an adult listening to those sounds, awake.
What’s more intersting is that unhappy human voice sounds – crying etc – activate the insular cortex and gyrus rectus more strongly, again just like in fully conscious adults. So babies can hear us and interpret our mood from our voices even when they’re asleep.
Nobody’s really sure why this is. Maybe the babies are processing the sounds and learning as they sleep. Maybe they’ve already learned to recognise those sounds and associate them with maternal stress they experienced in the womb. Maybe they’re just evolved to be alert to any sign of danger while they sleep, and people arguing or crying around them could potentially do something dangerous.
Whatever the reason, I’m glad that science has finally supplied some evidence to back up all the anecdotes and old wives’ tales about not doing your freaking-out in the same room as your sleeping infant.
Source: New Scientist
Image credit: ECohen
“You will keep getting older, and then you will die.”
I’ve been a bit of a mess lately, with the broken rib and the dodgy customer in Belgium [I didn't tell you about that. I'm probably not going to, either] and daily news reporting and the baby swimming lessons [yes, we do those - tell you later] and the family and well, everything you normally have to do but sorer because of the rib.
I looked at my feeble attempts to engage with The Tao of Awesome, and figured I could do better, so I decided to run it again from the start. Then I failed to start.
Today I got an email with a new post from Johnny B Truant. It was long and said a lot of epic shit. But the one thing that stood out the most was this:
You will keep getting older, and then you will die.
I want that on a fucking T-shirt. Printed normal and with a vertical flip so I can read it in the fucking mirror.
Know how temporary you are. Know that you are running out of time every nanosecond. Know how irrelevant you are to almost every other force and particle in the universe. Know that this means two things:
- You must act now.
- If you fuck up, it’s not the end.
Figure out what you really REALLY WANT and then go after it with every fucking piece of you, right now. Repeat. Don’t stop. Ever. There isn’t time.
You will fuck up, repeatedly, for definite. No way around that for anybody. But unless it literally kills you, you will by default survive and keep on rockin’.
Time is running out. Now. It isn’t “Do or die,” it’s “Do *then* die.”
Get on with it.
Image credit: chim0
Animal Intelligence: Crows learn who to mouth off at
This is awesome. New Scientist says there are crows on the Uni of Washington campus who were subjected to an experiment 5 years ago in which they were temporarily captured & released by someone wearing a particular mask. They learned to recognise the mask and flashmobbed anyone wearing it; they followed the wearer around, cawing at top volume.
Nifty thing is, only 26% of the crows did that 2 weeks after the start of the experiment. After almost 3 years, 66% of the crows exhibit the same behaviour when they see the mask. That includes birds who weren’t even born yet when the trappings happened – they simply learned who to ‘scold’ from their parents.
This struck me as amazing and even cute, but then I had to think: what if instead of following people and cawing at them, the birds had turned to terrorism? If we’re not the only species that can learn a behaviour from others around us, we’d better hope they never learn to copy the ways that humans react when we feel oppressed by sinister external forces.
As people and especially as parents, we need to remember the crows before we display prejudice, anger, hatred and aggression. Let’s not have our children grow up screaming at masks only we’ve taught them to fear, when they don’t even know what’s underneath.
Just a thought. Yours?
If you want to read the whole paper, it’s here.
Image credit: crowdive
uPVC God
We’ve been getting a lot of visits recently from god botherers. Except that they’re not bothering god – I understand their own is quite pleased with them, and I don’t think the other gods give a toss. They’re bothering me.
The ones that came this morning looked like double glazing salesmen – the suits, the briefcases, the earnest-faced older man and the slightly dodgy sidekick with the skinhead and stocky build. But they had pamphlets with something about light and truth written on the front. I’ve had doorstep debates with the older one before, during which he tried to convince me that
- eternal life isn’t against the laws of nature that his god allegedly designed
- there’s no reason to think our Sun will ever run out of fuel
- I should do a bunch of stuff I don’t want to do now, so that I can have an eternal life I don’t fricking want later.
I have no idea what religious group they’re affiliated with. I didn’t check.
Now I’ve sold double glazing myself in the past, for the evil Anglian Windows. Almost everyone I know has worked for them at one time or another, usually as briefly as possible. None of us enjoyed bothering people who didn’t want or expect to hear from us, interrupting their day, and then trying to sell them something they rarely needed or could afford. So why is it an approach that appeals to religious groups?
I much prefer the Jehovah’s Witnesses who call on me. Those nice friendly middle-aged ladies never directly tell me that my beliefs are wrong or that I’m going to be frowned on by their god and not allowed into the dead people’s party, or that I should do what their god says. They just bring me interesting-yet-unlikely reading material about intelligent design and stuff.
And I say that I’m happy to accept nobody knows what happened in the gaps in the fossil record, and we don’t know for sure exactly how non-living stuff produced living stuff; I just doubt (for a plethora of reasons) that what happened was a personal intervention by the hand of their god. But I’ll read whatever they put through my letterbox anyway, I tell them, because they mean well. I do wonder, though, about their conversion rates. You’d think a god would have figured out a more effective marketing mix by now.
But maybe he’s making good profits [if you think that's an amusing pun, kindly look in a mirror & give yourself a scathing eyebrow raise] already. Self-help shit sells by the bucketload, no matter how vague, ill-conceived or poorly expressed. People will pin their hopes on it, they’ll pay for it, and they’ll follow its instructions, and they’ll blame themselves when it “doesn’t work” for them (i.e. they don’t become perfect beautiful beings with perfect beautiful lives).
Now that just makes me sorry for all the lonely, gullible, needy, vulnerable people who open their door to two smiling faces with all the glib answers they need to realise there’s a big hole in their lives, and that hole can be filled with uPVC. I mean god.
uPVC god.
Identity = a mode
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle, philosopher, 300-something BC
Related Articles
- What Aristotle Taught Us About Web Content Development (verticalmeasures.com)
10 Ways to Work Incredibly Hard with No Results Guaranteed
I was recently informed that this is an example of a terrible headline/subject line that would put people off reading further. Got to say, I totally disagree. For one thing, you just did it. Q.E.D., etc.
Also, it has a huge subtext of honesty and the potential for all these great results (though they’re not guaranteed, they’ve been mentioned; now they’re on your mind and the non-guarantee irrationally makes them seem more, not less, likely provided one is not a total lazy idiot. Which one is not, of course, else one would not be here reading such a classy blog.)
Soufflé (image via Wikipedia)
So, as promised:
- Raise children.
- Do the big holiday grocery shop.
- Fall in love.
- Help the lazy.
- Give up sleep and food to make time for everything else.
- Make (and serve) soufflé.
- Blog outdoors at sub-zero temperatures in a howling wind.
- Count calories.
- Write an epic trilogy in a fictional language.
- Do your best.
I’m currently doing 7 out of 10. How about you? Let me know in the comments section so we can compare…
Related Article (read to the end – the last one’s the best)
- Best Headlines Ever (offbeatearth.com)
You can take the girl out of the torture chamber, but…
“I like to inflict happiness. If that means suffering, I assist.”
I said this to someone earlier today, and it snagged my thoughts for a while.
The notion of happiness as inflicted, implying an unwilling victim. The choice of “assist” [unspoken "...with"], rather than inflict, indulge, provide, or any other verb that only flows one way. The phrasing, the sound of the sentences in my head, the way that voice came so naturally when the conversation turned to domination and submission, sadism and masochism.
To clarify, because I’m aware I may not have mentioned it before:
Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I was a professional dominatrix. I did this because it paid well, and it sounded like less effort and trauma than working in a call centre. I liked the shiny clothes that felt like armour, the accessories made of steel and black leather. I was good at it. The words and mannerisms came easily, the psychological game was a ritual I found satisfying. The drive to mesmerise and torment my prey was instinctive.
I left that line of work more than a decade ago. I don’t miss it. It was sad to go so unchallenged, to be left with nothing to push against, to know that any resistance I encountered was offered only with hopes that it would be overcome.
The instinct is still there, but the flavour of the game has changed. I’m one half of a matched pair, as likely to be a happy little kitten as a prowling tigress. My love is multifaceted, refractive, sparkling at the centre of a radiant spectrum of desires. You can’t take the torture chamber out of the girl, but that doesn’t matter when you already have the key.
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