fickle | Entries tagged with no: what the fucking fuck?!

When I first saw the images of nooses hanging from lamp posts, I thought it was some sort of evil backlash against Obama being elected the American president.

The actual explanation makes so much less sense. It's all the fault of Amnesty International. No, really.

I am filled with disbelief. I mean, seriously, EMPTY NOOSES HANGING FROM LAMP POSTS? How is that not incredibly creepy? Yes, I get that the point is to get people's attention but you know what? I'm not going to look at a noose and think, "Oh, hey, the death penalty's bad". I'm going to think, "Oh my god, who are they planning on lynching, I want OUT of this city right now!" And Germany does not have the most foreigner-friendly history either, which makes it all the more baffling that they'd do this.

I'm not black, I wasn't raised in America, and my first thought upon seeing a noose hanging from a lamp post near me would be "RUN!". Or possibly to call the police and report it just in case someone is going to actually be lynched there.

About the only bright side I can see is that the nooses came up last year, and so this isn't some strange form of racebaiting as a response to Obama.

Please note that I don't rule out that it's race-baiting. Just not as a response to him. Because argh, that's such a stupid gimmick.

Heard of the Open Source Boobie Project?

If you haven't, you should probably know straight off the bat that the name's a misnomer. Open Source has nothing to do with this because breasts are not publicly shareable bits of property. Breasts belong to the person they are attached to. They do not belong to anyone else -- not the doctor, not the plastic surgeon, not the boyfriend/girlfriend/significant other of the moment and not the hungry baby. My breasts, my uterus, my vagina, my body.

And if you try to act otherwise, I will most likely oppose your viewpoint either firmly or violently depending on your level of stupidity.

That said, what exactly am I so snarly about this? Multiple reasons.

For a moment, everything that was awkward about high school would fade away and you could just say what was on your mind. It was as though parts of me were being healed whenever I did it, and I touched at least fifteen sets of boobs at Penguicon. It never got old, surprisingly. Women are not responsible for your sexual healing. If you had a hard time picking up girls in high school or getting to touch their breasts, dressing up wanting to touch a lot of breasts at a con as 'sexual healing' does not make it look less sleazy. Like someone else said, my breasts do not have magical healing powers.
Like brown_betty said, "apparently there is a deeply felt conviction among some subset of men that the problem with today's society is that they do not have enough access to women's bodies."

Of all the things that are wrong with society, I really don't think that's one of them.

( Four more reasons under the cut. )

More reactions, many much more articulate, can be found here.

Why?

Basic accounts can no longer be created.

In other words, you either have to face ads or you get a Paid account. Want to know what makes this worse?

They didn't announce it publicly. The only hint of it is in a comment to the news post.

Basically, that means that I am OUT of el-jay RPing unless I recycle an old journal because I sure as hell refuse to create a Plus account when it fucks over everything so much and when they PROMISED it would never happen.

iJay's got ads, yeah, but at least they're honest about it. This was x-posted from my iJay (

fickle), which is a Permanent Account. I don't usually x-post but in this case, I definitely consider it worth it.

Current Mood: pissed off

About two years ago, I ended up friends with

greyhawk. It was a strange friendship, entered into a little warily because we're at opposite sides of the political spectrum on practically every issue. He's a small-c conservative and I'm a liberal, fairly far to the left but we managed to have a reasonable conversation about politics, and became lj-friends.

Why am I bringing it up now?

I've noticed that this election isn't affecting my circle of friends and myself by polarizing us against Republicans. Instead, we're being polarized against each other.

If you're for Obama, you're for Obama. Hook, line and sinker. You can't take any criticism of him, and you defend every mistake he makes.

If you're for Hillary, you're for Hillary. Hook, line and sinker. You can't take any criticism of her, and you defend every mistake she makes.

I have friends whom agree with me on pretty much every political point. We're all pro-choice, anti-death penalty, pro-gay marriage. But when it comes to the Obama versus Hillary split, it's shut-up-and-don't-talk-about-it.

I have friends who will toss me links to YouTube videos of Obama's ads, but shut me down if I bring up the fact that I support Hillary.

So my question is, how did this happen? When did it get to the point that it's easier to talk politics calmly with conservatives than with people who actually support my stances?

I'm not a fan of Obama because personally, I think his foreign policies suck. He tried to act tough when he said that he'd be willing to order strikes against Pakistan, and he's made no mention of working with the UN. That doesn't mean that I'm not pleased with his record on abortion rights, to take one example. It just means that I don't want to vote for him, and that I don't think he'd make a good President.

It doesn't mean that I'm incapable of having a calm, rational discussion about the candidates and their relative merits/flaws.

On The Issues is THE best source I know for researching the stances of the candidates on different issues. Go check it out.

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, click here for a helpful comment that shows all the ultra-cool v-gifts that Russian users have.

Poison and grenades, wow! Perfect for a country with civil unrest.

I actually think the poison is kinda cool. It's emo-tastic. But it seems weird that if it's not appopriate for the US brand of livejournal, it's okay for Russian livejournal and that el-jay would let their trademark be diluted like that anyway.

Current Mood: shocked

Gaia Online is a roleplaying site where you get to dress up cute little avatars. I used to be on it, aren't really anymore, but still have an account there with expensive goodies that are probably worth even more now since the value of limited edition items go up with time.

For last few days, I've been dealing with an odd attempt to beg for my account there. E-mails pertaining to it are below, just because I'm boggled about why anyone would think it's a good idea to approach a random stranger and ask for their identity.

( From start to end. )

She was perfectly polite about it and seemed to realize what a weird thing it was to do, but still, dude. I use Fickle Goddess in multiple places and have a fair share of friends on that account, I wouldn't want someone else using it.

Taken from

__marcelo
>>

Air Force Charges Victim in Her Own Rape

This news item made my stomach turn: Cassandra Hernandez, a female Air Force airman was raped, reported her attack and then subsequently became a court-martial defendant, herself.
The story goes down like this: Hernandez was at a party, where she was drinking. She says that three male airman raped her. She went to the hospital and filed a report accusing her attackers. Due to stress and harsh interrogation tactics by the Air Force, she eventually refused to testify against the airmen.
The Air Force then charged her with underage drinking (of which she admits to being guilty, but that's hardly the point, now is it?) and, along with her three attackers,"indecent acts." I had a hell of a lot of trouble finding an official definition for "indecent acts," and the best one I came up with is a "form of immorality relating to sexual impurity which is not only grossly vulgar, obscene, and repugnant to common propriety, but tends to excite lust and deprave the morals with respect to sexual relations." Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the basic translation seems to be "a sexual act, particularly one that is not generally accepted in society, such as sex with multiple partners."
So. The woman was raped. By three men. She reported her rape. She was harassed by her superiors, to the point where she became too afraid to testify. The Air Force took this as meaning that the sex was therefore consensual (which isn't what it means at all), and charged her in the case of her own rape. If she loses her case, she could be publicly registered as a sex offender.
Sounds like it couldn't get any worse, right? But it does. How? The three alleged attackers were offered sexual assault immunity to testify against Hernandez on the indecent acts charge. Having at least half a brain cell among them, they accepted.
Hernandez is writing to her congresspeople and her Governor, Rick Perry, in a desperate plea to end this madness. Once you finish throwing up, crying, breaking things, etc., I strongly suggest that you write, too.
IMPORTANT CORRECTION: Apparently, the correct action to take is to write directly to YOUR congresspersons. You can find the information to write to your Representative here, and the information to write to your Senators here. It is a good idea to include one of the links to articles about thecase, so that they know specifically what you are referring to.

Posted by Cara at 04:15 PM | in Law, News, Sexual Assault, Violence Against Women

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Spotlight this post to the media

if any of you have a good way of passing this around--to each other or to the news through the spotlight thing--PLEASE DO IT. follow the links to write to your congressperson. (if anyone wants a pre-written letter to sign, i can draw up a template.) maybe if we get the word out, something can be done about it. <<

The level of rage on my part is not to be believed. Want to pass this on to let more people know about, links and everything? The entire rich-text file of the page can be found <a href="http://svendra.com/lj/post.txt">here</a>.

I wonder if getting an e-mail from a UN addy makes the congresspeople more or less likely to listen to me?

Current Mood: infuriated

[Poll #1031454]

Quite apart from anything else, the idea of considering mixed-species relationships as the same kink as mixed-race relationships is one that makes me boggle. But let's get down to the meat of this post, shall we?

So, over at

daily_deviant, the mods manage to suggest miscengenation (have a good explanation of why it's a racist term) would be a good prompt, were informed it's a racist term and perhaps they could use 'interracial' instead, refused and took offense at being told they could be OMGRACIST for using that term, and then there was a wanksplosion.

Meanwhile, the DD mods have changed the term but they haven't apologized for the way they behaved at the start, especially to

witchqueen who was the original one to bring up her complaint. Go comment to their latest admin post and point out that just perhaps when you accuse someone of being oversensitive and defaming your comm, you might want to apologize when you realize you're wrong.

And as a reward for those of you that go comment (which I'm sure is going to be all of you, right? ^_~) : Boys kissing -- color-coordinated to match the theme of this post, even.

Current Mood: tired

So, this morning, I heard a commotion in my sister's room, panicked, jumped out of bed and went to see what was wrong.

Turned out that one of the maids had varicose veins in her foot and one had suddenly POPPED, resulting in an actual pool of blood on the floor. Or, well, blood creating a huge stain on the carpet, anyway.

I never knew that could happen, or that you could lose so much blood through your foot.

At any rate, my father's taking her to the doctor today, my mother's at work, and the other maid is taking care of my sister. My father, of course, is very annoyed because it's the maid he considers useless anyway and he's fretting about what could have happened if it had exploded during the night and she'd bled to death. It would have been a disaster explaining it to the Austrian police and to her family back home. My mother's more focused on the fact that this means we'll be short-staffed and I'm feeling kind of exhausted-sick-feverish though that really has nothing to do with Charndini being sick.

Moral of the story, kiddos, is that varicose veins are bad. Avoid developing them if you can.

Current Mood: numb

( Sian & I! )

HP: Order of the Phoenix. Liked it better than the book, had a long vidcast with Sian that got erased when my laptop crashed while recording it, and just read some spoilers that was in a link in WR's post.

OMG! I just went to the link again and the journal has been deleted! Do you think that means the spoilers were real and the journal got deleted for posting copyrighted material before it was even released, or did the ontd_trash journal owners delete it to give the scanned pages more street cred?

...If those spoilers (actual scanned pages from the book, supposedly) were real, I will fucking laugh at how awful JKR's writing has gotten. I really, really will. XD And then I'll curse the 20 Euros I spent buying that piece of trash.

Current Mood: confused

If your flist hasn't already exploded about lj's spree of deleting journals based on their interests, go take a look over here.

There's also protest-meme going around where you remove all your interests and replace them with simply 'freedom' or 'freedom of speech' in addition to signing the petition linked to in that entry.

The whole mess has even made it onto Fandom Wank.

Personally, I'm curious. Do people with Paid Accounts get refunds on their remaining time if their journals are deleted/suspended for completely ridiculous reasons? I don't think that I have anything triggering in my interests, but if mine goes under, you can bet that I'm going to inquire about the logistics of this.

China takes 'Net addiction very seriously.

The part that killed me was:

Addiction to the Internet is blamed for most juvenile crime in China, a number of suicides, and deaths from exhaustion by players unable to tear themselves away from marathon game sessions.

In 2005, a Shanghai court handed a life sentence to an online game player who stabbed a competitor to death for stealing his cyber-sword -- a virtual prize earned during game-play.

SUICIDES. DEATH FROM EXHAUSTION. Holy fuck, guys. I mean, I've stayed up for 40+ hours from insomnia but that's not the same as not being able to tear myself off the Net. I stay on the Net because I'm awake, not stay awake to be on the Net.

And apart from which, boot camp? BOOT CAMP? Some of my closest friends are people who I know because of the Net. How does that equal sociopathy due to not enough interaction with other humans? Gah. Who gets sent to boot fucking camp to cure Net addiction?

Not to mention that I'm exhausted enough to picture a camp full of shoes, pumpin' it to the max. High heels working that spine, sneakers flapping their tongues, laces really testing how much weight they can take, etc. It's a rather amusing mental image, though it does absolutely nothing to alleviate the absolute horror of being sent off to BOOT CAMP for Net addiction.

Really. BOOT CAMP. And in case you haven't got the point already, BOOT CAMP. Boot freakin' camp, man.

Edot: Okay, so this has nothing to do with Internet addiction at all, but for all the short, gorgeous girls on my flist who hate their height, here's an interesting little snippet about heights and celebs.

Christina Aguilera (5'2")
Eva Longoria (5'2")
Rachel Bilson (5'1")
Hillary Duff (5'2")
Britney Spears (5'4")
Kate Bush (5')
Jessica Simpson (5′4")
Jada Pinkett Smith (5′)

I'm the same height as Britney Spears and have better hair. Cool.

Do not clean pierced ears with mint dental floss.

I realize that might sound obvious to some of you, but if you're a college student who recently got her ears pierced, thinks one of them is too swollen to use cotton swabs on and really wants to make sure it's clean, you might have the brainwave of using dental floss to try to clean behind the earring.

Take it from me, it's a bad idea. Your ear won't drop off, but it will sting like crazy. ~~Though maybe cotton thread would work if you soak it in disinfectant first.~~

Aren't you glad I'm here to find out stuff the hard way so that you won't have to?

Current Mood: chipper

Tamil Tigers wound US and Italian ambassadors.

Normally, I stay away from blogging about Sri Lanka politics but honestly, the Tamil Tigers just sounded like such idiots that I had to quote them here.

"I express our regret at this unfortunate incident," said Rasiah Ilanthirayan, the Tamil Tiger spokesman.

"We are shocked at how the Sri Lankan state childishly exposed very high-level diplomats," he said.

"Our people were not informed of the diplomatic movement...This is a criminal negligence on the part of the Sri Lankan military," Ilanthirayan said.

So, let's get this straight, the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization that is responsible for the civil war that's been raging in Sri Lanka for over twenty years, is blaming the Sri Lankann military for their assault on the diplomats? Does anyone else think this sounds incredibly stupid?

"Oh, yeah, we attacked the diplomats but it was YOUR FAULT for letting them be near us!"

Since, you know, it clearly wasn't the Tamils' fault for being idiot terrorists that attack helicopters without even checking to see if they're carrying civilians, military or in this case, foreign diplomats.

If Bush invades Sri Lanka to get rid of the Tamil Tigers, I am going to be pissed beyond belief.

Britney's bald, blah blah blah. Not the important bit. I was reading Go Fug Yourself, the site that's basically devoted to mocking famous fashion mishaps, and they had this article on Britney's new hairdo.

The part that makes it worth posting about? The first link in their article goes to an entry in

ohnotheydidnt.

I am amazed.

Some days, I really, really hate people.

Elie Wiesel, for those of you who don't know, wrote a very famous book called Night about his experiences of the Nazi death camps. It's an incredibly moving and emotionally honest book. I grew up in Austria, I grew up knowing of the concentration camps and death camps and the atrocities committed, but absolutely nothing brought it home like the way that book did.

It horrifies me to think that even now, so many years after the Holocaust and probably when Wiesel thought he was safe, someone would target him for anti-Semitic reasons. Hasn't he suffered enough already? Attacking anyone based on such a stupid reason is awful but to go after someone that's had to live through an experience like that is the kind of thing that makes me want to scream -- there should be a level of pain that if you endure, you will not have to suffer more.

Argh. Breathing is ridiculously difficult when I'm this outraged.

Current Mood: pissed off

Okay, I think that I'm going to have to join the people on my flist complaining about this new update interface. They're going to let us at least use the old one as an option, right? At some point?!

As a Dystopia-layout user, I'm even getting a totally unnecessary scrollbar on the bottom. Unless I fullsize the screen, which is really pretty pointless.

And if you have no clue what I'm talking about, try updating your journal.

Current Mood: annoyed

You know livejournal has the little eye icon to indicate private posts and the lock icon to show friends-locked posts? They ought to have a red lock icon to show filtered posts, maybe with a list of the other users that can see it.

[Poll #861005]

( And now, for what inspired that poll. And boys kissing. )

Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Sorrow -- Bad Religion

Link of the Day: Gay Marriage across the US.

A nicely drawn map of the US, color-coded to show the various regions that are for, against, and silent on the issue of gay marriage. Rather depressing to look at, so you might want to bear in mind New Jersey's rule on gay marriage while you read it.

( The Fossil Fuel Problem. NOT WHAT YOU THINK. )

Current Mood: disappointed

You know the new feature el-jay has that lets you know when you've been added to someone's friendslist? Well, I found out that

myfandoms added me to their flist so I toddled over to check them out on the off-chance that I wanted to friend them back.

It turned out that the journal is basically a big advertisment for a site, myfandoms.com, and that the guy running it is hyping it as:

MyFandoms.com is a new site opened in Beta phase while we’re making sure we have all the tools and features fan fic writers want and need. Later in the fall, we’ll be conducting a fan fiction contest that will be judged by several prominent Hollywood producers, directors, and writers. This is your chance to get YOUR fan fiction read by people who create and make TV shows and movies! By being among the first to add their fan fiction to the site, you are guaranteeing yourself maximum exposure to every member who comes behind you.

Wow. I'm so impressed.

I thought at first that this might violate el-jay TOS because technically, you could make a case for this to be considered spamming, but on the other hand, it's not like I have to read that journal or do anything about the fact that it friended me.

But then I checked my other e-mail, my personal one (which is different to the one that el-jay comments to this journal get sent to), and I found out that I had an e-mail there from him! Which made me go rather wtf?! because the only way for him to know that address is to have somehow got it from my ff.net records or my deadjournal. And if he got it from ff.net, then why did he friend my personal journal instead of my writing journal (

only_fiction)?

On the bright side, the e-mail at least cleared up how he'd found me:

Some people have written back to ask "how did you find me?" Basic Google searching is the answer. I just looked for people who had a healthy number of stories in popular fandoms. You're the people we want to join the myFandoms.com writers! We hope to see you soon. :-D

Also, what's a 'healthy number of stories'? I barely have fifty stories on my ff.net account and most of the good stuff is on my writing journal and not posted anywhere else. Though I suppose that I should be impressed that I popped up on Google (as did

cairnsy apparently since she got friended too) when I really think of myself as a relatively obscure writer sans the sort of BNF status that you think would be what would send people to the top of Google lists.

*confused and waaaaaaay too sleepy to be dealing with this right now*

Current Mood: confused

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{look upon my works, ye mighty}

{and despair}

Nooses, coming to a city near you!

someone needs to tell him it's Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

No new accounts for me on eljay, even for RPGs.

Political Polarization: Obama vs. Hillary.

Wow, LJ. Why do the Russians get the dangerous gifts?

People Are Weird: An Exchange of E-mails Between Myself and 'Emily'

Would you like to be court-martialled for having been raped? No? Didn't think so.

Poll + HP Fandom Does It Again.

Varicose veins are DANGEROUS.

you could be happy -- OMGWTFBBQ?!

lj strikeout '07/warriors for innocence

Internet addiction BOOT CAMPS?!

Important Life Lesson!

Way to make yourself look stupid, Tamils.

El-Jay really IS taking over the world.

Wiesel attack.

...Oh. OUCH.

Friends, Filters and Internet Bullying.

Fossil Fuel + Link of the Day: Gay Marriage Map.

Myfandoms.com -- what the hell?

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October 2024

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