Posts tagged: thoughts
I think about it periodically and wonder why i support a woman’s right to choose but that’s the thing. It’s not about ‘protecting’ a potential life, it’s about protecting an established life and the rights of an adult who decided to have sex. I’m basing most of my statement on consensual sexual acts and will address other forms of pregnancy in a moment.
Two people decide they want to have sex and take the necessary precautions but somehow the woman winds up pregnant with a kid they were not expecting. She doesn’t realize it in time for a morning after pill and it’s now been a few weeks, this hypothetical couple talk it over and decide they don’t want to have the kid, it’s still the first trimester and this thing is far from being a viable life. I’m in favor of them being able to have a safe and healthy abortion because these consenting adults decided this was not the time in their lives to have a child.
Another situation, some people get together and have sex, maybe under the influence of a few things and insemination happens. The woman decides she doesn’t want to have the kid and wants an abortion, go get it.
A married couple has three children and insemination happens, again, they decide they want an abortion because they have enough children. I say go for it, they have had children but they haven’t gone through possible procedures to prevent future children, yet, and they want a safe abortion.
A young couple, barely a few years married get pregnant and decide it’s a bit too soon, they want to enjoy being married to one another without the responsibility of another life yet. They want to stay up and party or whatever and do the things that slow down once children are a factor, but they got pregnant and want an abortion.
A committed couple gets pregnant and later on learns their child has some terribly genetic or chromosomal deficiency or disease. They decide to abort it because they don’t think they’ll be able to afford the treatments necessary. i support that because they are honestly thinking about the life that they cannot provide for that others might not want to take knowing it won’t be easy.
A mother gets pregnant and the baby is the cause of her illness and will kill her. That’s the difficult choice of one life versus neither. If the couple decides to abort, i want it to be a safe and healthy affair because it’s already difficult enough having to get rid of a potential child they wanted.
Let’s say the child was conceived in a negative fashion. Rape or incest and the mother wants to get rid of it. I’ve stated positive experiences where I agree it should be an option and it’s the same for negative experiences.
I don’t think any of these people are demons for thinking about themselves before their potential children. I don’t believe that life starts at conception, if those replicating cells were in even a mildly different environment they’d die quickly. That’s not an ability to live or cope with different surroundings. Not every baby that leaves a uterus at term can cope but modern science keeps them alive, whether their bodies are up to it or not.
It’s not that I don’t want people to have babies, I want people to want the babies they’re going to have. In each of these examples I give possible reasons why people may chose to have an abortion instead of carrying the child to term but i never said they had to have an abortion. I said that if they chose that I want it to be safe and healthy because it’s not an easy decision to come to, to decide you’re going to have a surgery to remove a potential life.
Some people argue for adoption but that may not always be an option. It could have been a consenting sexual experience but they may not be in a relationship, or the mother may not be able to afford pre/post-natal care so the fetus may not develop as well as it could. She may not be able to afford to take off of work to have the kid. There are also millions of children already waiting to be adopted. I’ve also seen first hand that the life of an adopted child can still be incredibly stressful, i don’t know the mother’s reasons for putting her kid up for adoption were i just know how the kid has turned out. 80% okay, 20% fucked up because of the situation she went into, but it could fuck up any kid.
But my main point is I support the right to choose and the right to a safe and healthy abortion. There are a million ways someone could get pregnant and many more reasons why they may decide to not have the kid and i disagree with forcing people to have children they do not want. True, they may come to like their kid, but plenty of loved and unloved children grow up to be murderers. Many grow up to be fine human beings. Many kill themselves accidentally or intentionally before they’re fully grown.
Life is full of choices from where you live to who you know, how you eat, if you believe in religion. Choosing whether or not to reproduce is huge. When, how, with whom and why. Those are all personal questions but no matter what someone decides, be it to have a kid or not, I think that everyone should be respected enough to make that decision themselves and if they decide to abort then I think it only fair that it can be done in a safe way.
I don’t always agree with people’s reasons or choice to abort but I to respect perfect strangers enough to let them make their own decision and I want them to be healthy.
Mansa Musa and Islam in Africa: Crash Course World History #16 (by crashcourse)
In which John Green teaches you about Sub-Saharan Africa! So, what exactly was going on there? It turns out, it was a lot of trade, converting to Islam, visits from Ibn Battuta, trade, beautiful women, trade, some impressive architecture, and several empires. John not only cover the the West African Malian Empire, which is the one Mansa Musa ruled, but he discusses the Ghana Empire, and even gets over to East Africa as well to discuss the trade-based city-states of Mogadishu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar. In addition to all this, John considers emigrating to Canada.
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I enjoyed learning ANYTHING about pre-colonial Africa in a positive light. History far too often just compares it to Europe written from the European biased history and a lot of Othering that taking it as it was and comparing it to itself and earlier Indian and European civilizations it makes sense in a way that Africa had developed differently.
Given that the European hand can’t be taken from African history and the high oral record keeping, I wonder how much more information there might be on African history had colonizing Europeans acted differently and had not worked as much to shift the foreign culture to something more resembling what they were accustomed to.
I don’t want to call the families of adopted children too sensitive for this reaction, my younger sister was adopted into my family, but I kind of feel as if they’re missing the point. With the pull quote used here it misses the set up for the joke and who the joke is on. Iit detracts from the end of Thor and earlier moments in The Avengers when Thor knowing Loki is adopted runs around just saying ‘he’s my brother’ and not ‘he’s my adopted brother’. Which when compared to Loki’s opinion of the entire thing they’re not related and Thor needs to die/leave him alone.
I kind of agree with the other points addressed that people are prescribing one thing to Whedon and the movie that they disagree with and not commenting on some of the larger overarching ideas that the characters expound on for more of the narrative.
If you follow me on twitter then you know I regularly comment on and critique things my little sister posts on Facebook. She’s 12 which explains a lot to be honest, constant ‘life if you [blank]’ or ‘share in 2 seconds and see something/get a million followers’ and shit like that, but this one takes the cake.
I can’t find the post the ‘liked’ but i remember what it looked like. Some skinny chick is wearing a smallish teeshirt and panties, she’s smiling at the camera and has her hands on her lower torso like someone who’s pregnant. The caption below the image amounts to ‘I quite smoking, drinking, popping pills doing drugs and shit so you’d be proud to have me as a mom.’ And the poster added “I wish more ladies did this instead of getting abortions.”
I read it and just scowled, I think it was kid but my sister has over 400 friends for some reason and they seem to all post a lot of shit. This one took me a minute to figure out why it bothered me so much. I mean, it’s all really trite in my opinion when I realized what pissed me off was the incorrect correlation between people who abuse drugs and alcohol as the only people getting an abortion. I mean, there’s being a good mother, wanting to be a good mother and not doing drugs or anything and then there are the full myriad of reasons why someone might not want a kid. Maybe they already have as many as they want, maybe they’re not ready mentally and emotionally for a being that is wholly dependent on them, maybe they can’t afford to keep a kid or do all the proper pre-natal things so they kid might come out malnourished or other.
I think I was mad at I think it was a kid, who decided that all women should have to raise the kid they get impregnated with. There are so many reasons to not carry a kid to term, I don’t believe that a pregnant woman has an obligation to keep their potential child. I have said this before, I’d prefer for people to keep them but if they’re not going to by all means, I just want it to be safely done for all parties involved.
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Typing this out also makes me think of the magical world that all adopted kids go. What I mean by that is some people say that all unwanted babies should be put up for adoption, but not every child put up for adoption will get adopted. Also, not every family adopting children are really healthy environments. There are plenty that are great but I have seen from first hand experience with my little sister that it’s not all hunky-dory for the kid in every family.
More important, though, there should be an easier way to access contraception. All parties in a sexual interaction should be mindful of keeping everyone healthy, safe and unless pregnancy is a wanted en result, unpregnant.
I was incredibly upset when my submissions didn’t make it into the student art show last week. After talking with a friend he told me I shouldn’t be upset about a media bias which I disagree with, I have every right to be upset that my comic pages or my print were not accepted into the show. I don’t know what the judges were going for but what I created was obviously and irritatingly not it so I was mad and I fumed and I cursed the things angering me to eat a bag of dicks because sometimes that response just feels nice.
Now, a few days later it’s still a bit sore. I have congratulated my friends for making it into the show having never spited them. I mean, technically we were all against one another for spaces and not everyone would be able to get into the show. But I threw this out to a friend that I should work to find a space to host a Comics and Sequential art show (that yields a great acronym, CASA) a show, a place, for people who do fine art but have an interest in the challenge of creating a visual narrative.
I probably could find a few people to participate in it and a space with relatively little trouble. I already have plans for a solo show for Fall 2013 but getting CASA done would be an awesome project. But, i guess it wouldn’t be fair for my art to be -in- the show if I were curating it…things like that can be figured out later.I kind of want to do it.
We were discussing homosexuality because of an allusion to it in the book we were reading, and several boys made comments such as, “That’s disgusting.” We got into the debate and eventually a boy admitted that he was terrified/disgusted when he was once sharing a taxi and the other male passenger made a pass at him.
The lightbulb went off. “Oh,” I said. “I get it. See, you are afraid, because for the first time in your life you have found yourself a victim of unwanted sexual advances by someone who has the physical ability to use force against you.” The boy nodded and shuddered visibly.
“But,” I continued. “As a woman, you learn to live with that from the time you are fourteen, and it never stops. We live with that fear every day of our lives. Every man walking through the parking garage the same time you are is either just a harmless stranger or a potential rapist. Every time.”
The girls in the room nodded, agreeing. The boys seemed genuinely shocked.
“So think about that the next time you hit on a girl. Maybe, like you in the taxi, she doesn’t actually want you to.”Indeed.
Brilliant.
This may be the best thing I’ve ever read.
I was thinking a little bit about my favorite books as a kid, like big ridiculous picture books and once I progressed past the Eric Carle cardboard books (which I still find inventive and adorable) along with the Books with Holes for “There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly”. Almost every 90s kid knew what happened “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie”, a moose a muffin and a pig pancakes.
Then I hit my early introduction to surrealism with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett, I mean, the slightly perverse Land of Chewandswallow, and the fact that the weather was food. Inventive, adorable, and weird like naught I’d seen before then, kind of, even if the book is ten years older than I. I think I also read Pickles to Pittsburgh, the sequel, but I know I loved and re-read that book multiple times. I didn’t see the movie because I didn’t care about why the weather was food, that information was not necessary to my enjoyment of the narrative so I skipped the movie and only have the book as my interaction with that narrative.
Another whacked out book I remember fondly was The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. I remember being confused but enjoying the art and the shift on well known narratives. Also from the creative team of writer Jon Scieszka and artist Lane Smith that I loved was Math Curse, a tale a kid who’s life becomes overrun with numbers and math. My elementary school didn’t too many others, or I happened to not find them which is regrettable, I think now as an adult I may work on building my own collection of children’s books, for nostalgia but also because the narrative illustrative work is pretty great.
Looking over Scieszka’s Wikipedia page I just learned he did the Time Warp Trio, I loved those books, I had the first 3 or so.
My childhood was full of some pretty great reading. Inspire and encourage your kids to read. I mean, my all means, give them Dr. Seuss and the Bearstein Bears, but also give them oddities like The Stinky Cheese Man, some kids may just want something a bit weird to read. That could be the hook, you never know.
If you realize “friendzoning” is just a modern name for unrequited love, it seems a lot less ignoble and more understandable.
You can’t be mad at someone for friendzoning you, that’s dumb and self-centered, but you can easily be mad at the situation of being friendzoned and that’s not at all unreasonable like some people make it out to be.
Misalignment of expectations in personal relationships is genuinely terrible and you’re not an asshole for not being able to be friends with someone any more because they don’t feel the same as you, not in my book at least.
I agree with this assessment. There are all types of relationships out there, I think putting so much emphasis on one person is unfair to that person and everyone else people may know.
This is kind of a response to this post from a question I sent Lazysmirk
I haven’t finished the book, I’m somewhere in the 200s on the closer side to 300 pages. The detail is interesting but it does feel like it’s bogging me down. It has been interesting reading the book in public because so many people know the movie but have never read the book when I tell them it’s more everything I have been asked why I’m reading it, I wanted to see what the differences were. The descriptions seem to be so much that I can’t focus on them which is why I think I meant, but the descriptions of clothes go over my head because I am far from a fashionista to any extent.
I think when I finish reading it an analysis would be interesting, I’m writing some thoughts on a second twitter account where I just talk about the books I’m reading and my immediate reactions to things pictured. I started it back in November and it’s taking me far longer than most books because I can only read but so many pages at a time. I also read a few books at a time, on top of each other so it makes taking a day off AP nice to sink into something else. The descriptions of violence or sex are a bit dull after a while, which is an interesting opposite reaction to Bateman who is so focused on those details that he makes note of them.
I think my issue is I read without analyzing, maybe I’ll scribble more the next time I read it because I’m sure I’ll feel some need to read it over again. I’ve noticed just how self-involved the characters are which seems like a blatant point. It’ll be interesting to re-watch the movie when I’m done with the book and to see where it was light on things and how it was light on things or different, (like the sense of time). Maybe I’ll say something to you again once I finish the book.
For the past few weeks I’ve seen different people discuss their opinions on correcting people’s poor grammar or spelling abilities. I’m no bastion for perfect spelling or grammar but it’s one thing for it to be a recognizable error, such as mixing up their/they’re/there or for having improper subject-verb agreement. I try to edit things I post to make sure everything is spic and span but I know more often than i’d like (I’ve fixed so many stupid typos in writing this short diddy, it’d be one thing for me to post it as was to show the difference between my fast typing and editing, but I do edit as I go because those fucking red lines are irritating. Chrome doesn’t believe ‘diddy’ is a word.)
Sorry for the detraction, I believe that a proper use of spelling is important, we notice incorrect spelling sooner than we notice incorrect grammar (sometimes) but it does more than make you understandable to others, it shows that you know how to spell. I tend to write off people who use text speak too often online, which I find stupid if you’re using a full keyboard why not spelling things the way they should be spelled? If it’s a quick personal note, sure whatever. I have so many stupid errors in my notes in class or notes to myself, but I’m generally the only person reading them.
Personally, I think people should strive to write correctly. Speaking is different because of the variety of audiences and how each needs to be addressed. I speak differently around friends than I do my family, which is different from teachers and faculty from how I’ll speak to someone I’ve only just met. I understand that most people consider the Internet to be an informal place but writing with incorrect spelling all the time everywhere seems gratuitous and silly. Thinking about how I speak here, this is written a bit more formally than other pieces, such as on my blogger my posts about disliking the MPAA or the parent groups who work to censor television, I’m venting there and incredibly informal and a lot. I’m still spelling things correctly and checking on the definitions of words to make sure I’m best understood.
That said, I’m going to work at not correcting other people’s grammar and spelling, I haven’t in a while because it’s fruitless and annoying. I try to ignore it but if I know the better grammar I generally will make a mental note that I’ll promptly forget because it honestly isn’t that important.
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Before I end this I will address one of my grammatical pet peeves, it’s the use of ‘I’ as an object. “I” is the subject of a sentence. The problem most people face is too often being corrected against using ‘me’ to refer to themselves and not understanding that ‘me’ is not a subject but things happen to ‘me’ as an object.
Examples:
Correct: I am going to the mall.
Correct: Bob and I are going to the mall.
Incorrect: Me and Bob are going to mall.
This bit of confusion leads to the next one I’m going to address. “Me” generally should not be used as the subject of the sentence, and were Bob to not be going to the mall then the sentence would be “Me am/Me are” which makes no sense. Most people understand that ‘Me’ is not a subject. The issue really is Bob deciding to go to the mall too. This leads to the next example!
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Correct: Henry gave the book to me.
Incorrect: Henry gave to book to Betty and I.
What should have been said was: Henry gave the book to me and Betty.
“Me” can come first when you’re the object of the sentence not the subject which is error from before. “I” generally is not the object of the sentence but the presence of someone being acted upon confuses people. So if Betty decided to not take the book with you, there would be no confusion.
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Fun extra! You might think “Give me the keys,” means that ‘me’ is the subject, but that is faulty thinking! There is an implied subject of ‘you’ which is why that sentence is not correct even though it seems like ‘me’ is the object.
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So go forth and be better understood and know that I won’t correct you. I may judge you, I sure as fuck judge myself when I post an dumb error, but I will not correct you. And I’m sure there are stupid errors here, I skimmed it and if I notice them I might judge myself, I probably will. I also hope I explained the common I/me kerfuffle well enough.
Thoughts? I don’t know.
It’s 8:30 the day after Christmas, generally known as Boxing Day or December 26th, i slept for 6 hours, my eyes burn but my optomitrists told me thy’re just a bit dry and I never bought the eye drops she suggested. Also, if I were tired I’d’ve gone back to sleep, I really need to buy those damned eyedrops.
Oh, the things I was going to talk about.
People are posting their Christmas gifts and I’m thinking about the different caliber of things that I got in comparison and I’ve realized that my family doesn’t know the geeky nerd-things I like. But they also have some gender-boner to get me girly things. Except my brothers, we give each other awesome shit.
I got money so I’m not going to complain about that.
Socks
Travel nail care kit (my bros got wallets here)
Sweatshirt (my bros got travel beard trimmers)
Moisturizer, hand lotion, lip balm, deodorant, others (my brothers got something similar)
My brothers gave me a 3DS and a slanket (a bigger snuggie). I gave one brother a bunch of chocolate alcohol and I got my other pancake/waffle mix and a hand mixer.
If you look at this list it’s all useful things, it’s also all boring, except the things from my brothers. I’ve looked at other people’s lists and seen they got comics, figurines and DVDs. I’m not saying I envy their gifts it’s just a thing I noticed, such different conditions. I’m planning on depositing most of the money, because it’s all cash and I don’t need that much cash on me almost ever. I also can’t do that until we get back home.
I’m looking forward to hitting up Midtown Comics (hopefully) today and Forbidden Planet NYC and buying at least one comic, maybe a poster or a figurine, I mean, we’re getting on the train and I don’t know how long we’re planning on being out. My family lives in New York, we’re outside Manhattan but it’s a quick enough train ride downtown. I guess that’s the concession. I’m not complaining, aside from socks, I got a bunch of things I wouldn’t buy for myself because I wouldn’t buy y self goofy colored socks but I’ll wear them.
Because of reasons.
I’m just thinking through things in a public forum of sorts. I still need to take the time to write my year end review thing. I don’t remember much from this past spring but it’s all good, I’ll figure it out or something.
I’ve spoken about movie posters a few other times but this is a bit different, and a lot shorter. (the initial rant is shorter but my examples not so much. )
I miss the old painted posters. They had a different sort of life and appeal as opposed to taking one round of promo shots then pasting and re-pasting them together awkwardly to make a modern movie poster. Not all of the old style of posters were perfect but it was nice to get an odd hint at multiple aspects of a movie, such as the hero AND villain, instead of one image with just a hero pose. I’d like the modern photo shoot ones more if more often they were shot that way and not pasted together later. Lighting and layering is still odd.
Example time!
Rich paintings that show heroes, villains, side characters and the environment for the movie. You get a bit to expect.
Photo edits that show some of the environment but are mostly edits from a a day or a few days of photo shoots.
(I love Rashida Jones but her dead smile here is creepy. Does this movie take place in a void?)
Here’s a small comparison from a few different genre of movies where I’m not saying it’s poor poster design I’m saying they’re not as engaging in a way because of how little they tell. The Inception ones hint at the world of the movie not being entirely real, Sherlock Holmes just tells me that it’s a period movie. I also think that the post-shoot cleaning up and air-brushing is distracting because they don’t quite look like real people, there’s just a little something missing.
