Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Surfacing
I’ve got some kind of bug, or I ate some bad food (I’ve decided to blame the leftover spinach; I really don’t do well with leftovers), so I’ve been uninterested in posting anything. Also, I’ve been fighting a battle with my cat’s fleas—I finally had to buy some overpriced flea soap, which I can’t afford, and I had to wash her twice in the last week. This involves me getting into the tub with her and listening to her yowls of Fear! and then having to wash myself to get all the flea soap off. I hope that soap did better than just make sure her fleas are nice and clean.
I’ve also been struggling with figuring out a new site design. I promise it will be plain, easy to read, dark-text-on-light-background, light on the graphics, etc. I want to overhaul the site to get everything tied together a little better than it currently is.
And that’s it. I can’t remember anything else I wanted to post about, so I’ll end this here.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Gilding the Lilies of the Fields
Okay, somebody tell me why I shouldn’t reconsider my long-held suspicion that Conservapedia isn’t some sort of Moby website? I mean, what true conservative thinks the Bible isn’t conservative enough? I’d like to know who’s really behind “the Trustworthy Encyclopedia,” which is presumably where we are all supposed to go instead of Wikipedia, where you’ll get icky liberal stuff all over you. I mean, if you read the freakin’ entry, it’s like a parody of what conservatives are supposedly against in modern society. I’m calling this a scam and declaring that anyone taken in by this site got pwned.
Updated: I just remembered, there already exists a “conservative” bible: it’s called the King James Edition, and it’s written in hard, uncompromising Jacobean English. “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” That’s Matthew 18:6, quoting Jesus, who was apparently not in a very liberal mood that day.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Reading for Dummies
The funniest comment to this post is this one:
Why is the Numa Numa guy on Blogging Heads?
Note to guys: if the bottom of your face is wider than the top of your face, don’t grow a beard. Anyway, why can’t Matthew Yglesias (who has one of those high, squeaky, beta male voices, by the way) just admit that he finds Clever, Ironic, Parodic, whatever, written-by-a-tragic-suicide-so-it-gets-moved-up-to-“important” giant long novel Infinite Jest boring, and that he doesn’t want to finish it? There’s no shame in that; even in the height of my reading mania (three books a day, DTs if my dad wouldn’t take me to the library) I was known to stop reading a book every now and then if I decided it wasn’t worth my time. But that’s not good enough for pseudo-intellectuals like Yglesias: they can’t admit that an “intellectual” activity like reading a long, acclaimed novel failed to keep their attention—that’s tantamount to treason to their peer group, for whom acts like reading things like Infinite Jest are worn like Eagle Scouts wear their badges, to show their accomplishments and gain status. So they tart up fake-o discussion topics like “Are Long Novels Still Worth Reading?” Hey, are home cooked meals still worth eating? Why, there’s all this fast food, so much of it, and restaurants too; why take the time and trouble to chop up onions and garlic and cook meat when you can have some reconstituted, regurgitated slop fried in oil by illegal Mexicans and handed to you ready to eat?
These Andrea Harrises are not me
As a public service announcement, I thought I’d alert my internet fans as to who Andrea Harris is not. A Google search of my name brings the Real Me up second on their page (!) with a link to my main site. Yays! However, I am not:
This expressionist artist.
Or this business consultant either.
I did not contribute anything to these books.
I’ve never lived in New York City. (Though I’m only a six hour drive away now! My new ambition: driving up to the city for Christmas. Just for a day.)
This is not my Twitter site!
I’m not on Facebook, though other Andrea Harrises are.
We are a diverse group.
I’m not Linked In, but this namesake is.
You don’t want to see me dance, but maybe this other not-me instead.
This Andrea Harris lives in England and has acted with David Tennant in Hamlet and in Doctor Who, so I hate her. (Oh not really.) (Yes, really.)
I was not saved at the tender age of fifteen! And I’ve never been to Barbados. But I have been to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. I was five.
Uh-oh. Don’t worry—I’m still here!
Or am I?
A trip down memory lane
Hey guess what? One of my old blogs, Twisted Spinster, is back up again! I had lost the ability to get to it because I let the Twisted Spinster domain lapse. But with help from my hosting service, I got it up and running again. I’m using the subdomain now—http://twistedspinster.spleenville.com/. So if you have old links, you can update them. (Note: this is for archiving purposes only—this is my old blog from 2004. I’m not going to be posting over there anymore. I just happened to have some good posts that year, as I recall.)
The Stand
It occurs to me that there are two basic kinds of ways of being in life. It’s not liberal vs. conservative or leftist vs. rightist. It’s like this:
There are people in the world, currently mostly to be found in positions of authority like the professional news and entertainment media, government, and academia, who are all about power and status and who’s in the “inner ring” (as C.S. Lewis called it), and who’s out. These people have no real friends or family as those terms have traditionally been recognized—they have associates and acquaintances (the way they talk about their friends—“she’s such a deeply spiritual person,” “he’s brutally honest”—“brutally honest” is powerspeak code for “rude and obnoxious and can’t be counted on to keep a secret”—“she’s so talented,” “he’s the most intelligent person I know”—the constant affirmations of the wonderfulness and specialness of them, is a clue to how shaky the relationships really are; real friends don’t need to blather on to everyone and sundry like this); and their intimate relationships are notoriously feeble and apt to break at the most trivial of pressures, such as the significant other leaving the toilet seat up or down, or voting Republican, or something. They are always waiting for the “right” moment—that is, the moment where it either won’t interfere with their incessant status-seeking or will enhance same—to have children. And so on.
Then there are people who don’t seek status or power, and it’s true that what you don’t seek you basically don’t have. They try to support themselves, by working and making money, but they don’t equate having a lot of money with being important in the larger scheme of things like the power-seekers do. And when it comes to friends and family, they don’t have an interchangeable set of bodies designed to get them further up the status ladder. They consider their friends and family to be both separate, individual people and part of the “team,” so to speak, and thus due for a certain amount of support no matter what they get into as individuals. I’ve vented frustration a few times at conservatives who put up with all manner of political nonsense from friends and family, but putting up with a certain amount of nonsense is seen as one of the normal conditions of life.
Anyway, the difference is brilliantly spelled out by Ann Coulter here in a response to high-status harpy Joyce Behar:
There is a liberal obsession with “tell us who your leader is.” And you realize why liberals want to know is because this is how they argue: they find who the leader is and they destroy him…. We’ve decided we’re not going with a leader this time, so you’re going to have to argue with us on the facts.”
Status-seeking liberals can’t function without someone over them both to tell them what to think (not so much what to do) and to try to drag down so they can replace him with another, “more perfect,” leader. Conservatives these days—or not so much conservatives but the people the powerful hold in contempt—have been making the mistake of trying to find a “leader” in this mold, but once that is done he becomes one of the powerful and gets sucked into the status-seeking maw and thus becomes useless. (That’s the other way they get you, see—if they can’t beat you, they’ll get you to join them. The only way back from this fate is to relinquish the power, but power is very alluring—only a few people in my lifetime have voluntarily relinquished it before it ate them up; Sarah Palin is one of these.) The only way to deal with this routine is to treat each other like a family or a team, and neither make celebrity leaders nor help the opposition drag them down. With all their talk of “the masses” and “the people,” the liberal Powers That Be can’t stand against an entire group.
Anyway, that’s why I won’t jump on the Glenn Beck-bashing bandwagon. I don’t listen to him—I don’t listen to talk radio—but he is entitled to his opinion as anyone else. And he’s one of us—you don’t throw family members under the bus.
(Via Kathy Shaidle.)
Of Interest • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Sunday, October 04, 2009
A Momentary Disturbance in the Force
Oops. I made a new template group in my Expression Engine setup so I could test different stylesheets before messing with my actual blog, and I forgot to switch to that group when I changed the style sheet. Fortunately I had the original style sheet saved.
Anyway, I’m trying to get into learning Expression Engine a little better. You’d think I would know now, since I’ved used it for years, but I never got that much into it. I mean, it’s only the software I use for my blog. Anyway, I’ve decided that switching the blog to something else like Wordpress is a waste of time, as this works quite well. I’m going to be changing the site design into something easier to read. I may make an entire new style sheet, or just change a few things in this one—for instance, make the font larger and darker, especially in the comments area.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Well there goes that dream (Update: or is it an even stranger, deeper dream?)
I remember somebody—I think it was Kathy Shaidle—wrote something about how Twitter seemed to be free of the trolling and comment fights that have infested blogs and forums and so on. I didn’t expect that pleasant state of affairs to last—and it seems it hasn’t. Unless this guy’s Twitter site is some sort of elaborate prank, because otherwise it seems that someone has figured out that Twitter is a great, near-anonymous way for people with little writing talent to vent those “bad thoughts” that would otherwise be confined to the bumper stickers on their Prii, and they can still attack other Twitterers, if not as directly as on a comment or forum thread.
Update: you know, the more I go through this guy’s tweets, the more I am beginning to think this is some kind of performance art thing, someone pretending to be a kind of distilled essence of the most obnoxious BDS-suffering troll. Because no one could be this idiotic and stupid, not in this day and age. Could they? Then again, looking back at some of my old comment threads on previous blogs... On the other hand, at least my trolls were pretentious and snotty in an over-educated way. I observed a while back that the quality of trolls in blogville had gone way down, almost as if the original pack of trolls, having some modicum of brain power, eventually found better things to do (like get lives, jobs…) leaving only their retarded cousins in the basement.
Trivial Twitter Update
I came across someone using the name “weirdsister” and decided to make my Twitter user name (and thus, Twitter site url) something more in keeping with my “twisted spinster” online presence. But “twistedspinster” was taken and adding “the,” “one,” or “a” to the beginning made the phrase too long for Twitter’s url setup. So I am now “twistyspinster.” It’s pretty neat that you can do that without losing your stuff. I’ve already sent notices to the few followers I have, changed the link on the sidebar, etc.
That’s all for now.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Fun with spam and comments and other stuff
I got a fifth or ninth or whatever spam comment on my Library site, so I finally remembered I had a Wordpress.com account and thus an API key and set up Akismet. Die stupid spammers die.
The comment fun in my previous post makes me wish (sort of) that I had nested comments in this blog, so people could reply to comments and thus avoid confusion. Wordpress has them, but I decided to run my blog under Expression Engine, which doesn’t. Maybe there is a plug-in, though I did sign up with Disqus which is a pretty neat commenting/forum service which includes a reply function and I could add that instead. Then again, I don’t get all that many comments, so would it be worth it? Or maybe I should just change the blogging software on this site to Wordpress.
And in other, non-blogging areas, I’ve been thinking about ebooks and web-fiction lately, and I have to agree with this guy that as things stand now the way web-fiction is presented on the internet sucks. For one thing, a lot of writers don’t seem to have any idea about how to make their text actually readable—they just think “ooh, I can have pretty colors!” so you get their novel or story in red text on an orange background, or something. And then there are the extra flashy things everyone seems to have on websites these days—ads and flash things and Youtube embeds and so on. That’s okay, I guess, for blogs (she said through gritted teeth) but I’m not going to read a web-novel if each page takes ten thousand years to load. And then there is the issue of screen width—it’s wearying to read long text entries that go all the way across a screen. And I will leave unmentioned (because then I won’t stop) those websites with fixed widths that are wider than the average monitor so you have to scroll across—horizontal scrolling is a nononononono for text-heavy sites. (Graphical arty sites are another matter. I’m not talking about those.)
More Nanny Government Interference
Did you know that the Obama administration has banned the sale of “flavored cigarettes” (like the goths’ beloved cloves) because they “lure adolescents into smoking”? Well thank you, Mommy President! Now the kids can go back to smoking Marlboros and other Big Tobacco brands, as God intended.
Seriously, this is ridiculous. Adolescents are “lured” into smoking for a variety of reasons, one of the big ones being that it pisses off purse-lipped no-fun we-only-want-what’s-best-for-you types like the ones in the anti-smoking (which mostly means, anti-smokers; no one is proposing actually shutting Phillips-Morris down, which would create havoc in Washington) movement. Personally, I wouldn’t smoke, but I will admit now that I find the aroma of unburned tobacco pleasant, and the scent of clove cigarettes even more pleasant and also evoking of that long-ago time when I stood around in over-airconditioned clubs where the only light came from a few candles on the bar and you didn’t have to talk to your friends and it was impossible anyway because you wouldn’t be heard over the Sisters of Mercy song currently playing. I had actually thought of buying a pack of cloves and sticking them in my car, just so I could have that aroma. Now I can’t, thanks to our new Hope and Change government that Cares About Our Children Better Than We Do.
Here, anyway, is a helpful article from Boing-Boing on how to roll your own, since they haven’t been able to ban people from making their own cigarettes. Yet. You just wait.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Self-Hatred Is Tiresome
And Michael Palin is awesome. I think he’s always been my favorite Python. He’ll be condemned as a racist, of course, but that term became meaningless quite some time ago so hopefully he won’t be compelled to make some sort of PC “apology.”
Anyway, I’m going to say it now: if British civilization hadn’t existed, then “democracy” would be an obscure, mostly-forgotten custom of ancient Greece. Think about it.
(Via Five Feet of Fury.)
This is just pitiful
Crazy old bag lady Charles Johnson’s street corner ravings have now encompassed the globe—in other words, he’s gone after Tim Blair. And so confident is La Charles in the rightness of his cause that he has banned Tim from being able to see his site. That must have been some re-education session.
Added: Ace comments.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Work Preventer
By way of explaining why I haven’t been posting much lately…
Yeah, that’s it, it’s the cat’s fault.
Also (grrr) I’ve been having some trouble with my Library site. I decided to upload a simple table of contents plugin widget thing, and try out some new themes, and now it’s being all balky. Also some asshole using a gmail address and a fake xanga.com url is spamming my comments over there with those stupid “asdfghjkl thanks for this!” comments. I have comments set to moderation but registration isn’t turned on, but I may have to do that. Well no one has commented on the Library site yet. It may be the theme I’m using—it’s pretty, but I’m thinking it’s not the best theme for my purposes (web-fiction) as some others. But I don’t want to play with the site if someone is trying to hack it.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I have an interview with a local school where I’m trying to get a job substitute teaching. Yeah, I know, teaching, ugh—but it’s not “real” teaching, and it will be better than the big nothing I have now. And I’ve been wanting to work on more of my story but I can’t seem to concentrate. Argh. Woes.
Update—the problem with the Library site seemed to be with the Table of Contents plugin I installed. I removed it, and now things work fine. I’ve switched to a plainer theme right now, but I’m still not sure what I want to do. Oh well, bedtime.
Monday, September 28, 2009
More story
I’ve written part 2 of the first chapter of my story, if you’d like to read it. (Of course you do. You want to please me. You want to OBEY me. You! Will! Read! Ahem. Yes.)
Blegging Bowl
Twitter Thing
twitter buttons
Most recent entries
- Site Move Update
- When I was an atheist
- US interference in Latin American politics
- Spammers DieDieDie Update
- Opinions are needed
- Many things about this are not good
- And they wonder why women are still messed up in the head
- Insert “Hot For Teacher” Joke Here
- Podhoretz Person
- Site redo updates
Categories
Monthly Archives
Syndicate
-
Site provided by HostingMatters.