JOURNAL: Arigatomina

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  • Discrimination 2008-02-13 01:52:23 A woman begins an online campaign about a swimsuit contest. She wants to get the standards lowered. She argues everywhere she goes about how standards are limiting and how, in the old days, it was the heavy madonna women who were considered attractive. Other people come back and counter that an obese person isn't being "limited" by the standard of the swim suit contest. It's not the contest to blame for the person being a cronic overeater who doesn't get off her couch. Why should we lower our standards just because lazy people don't want to work to meet them? The woman replies that some people like overweight women and so the standards should include them as being beautiful, what with beauty being a matter of opinion. We remind her that those people are in the minority and they're not judging the contest. She changes tactics slightly to attack the issue of pimples. They're nature's signs of puberty, they didn't used to be looked down on, so the contest shouldn't hold pimples against the contestants. We scratch our heads for a second and then remind her that in the past people didn't have the handy facial cleaners we have now to get rid of pimples. These days most pimples exist only because people are to lazy to clean their faces properly.

    After a while, we agree to disagree. Because we really don't understand why she's so interested in lowering the standards of a contest that is so shallow to begin with. Why not try to get rid of the contest instead of making it easier for ugly fat people to win it? Before she goes leaves, the woman mentions, "By the way, I'm a midget. I don't want my own contest, I want to win yours. You're discriminating against me by having standards I'm physically too short and dumpy to meet. I don't like you." We go, "Oh, that explains it!"

    Does that make me a bigot?

    Keep in mind we weren't actually talking about a beauty contest. We were talking about the use of good grammar by writers. She wanted to get rid of grammar standards so no one would be "limited" by having to follow commonly accepted rules. We went on pointing out all the communication problems that would cause, how that would promote even more laziness from the bad writers on the net. She brought up the fact that grammar rules change all the time, some famous writers couldn't spell to save their lives, some people used to write their own personal nonsense rather than a recognized language, and they still managed to communicate. We point out that abstract art is nonsensical, and maybe it is "art", but it doesn't communicate anything. Story writers are trying to communicate something. Grammar standards are necessary for that.

    It wasn't until far later that she mentions, "By the way, I'm deaf, so I have trouble using your grammar rules when I speak. I don't want you to make an exception for me or to treat me differently, I want you to lower the standards for everyone so someone like me can be considered as good as the ones who don't have learning disabilities or physical handicaps. I don't like you."

    My first reaction is still, "Well, that explains it."

    I don't think we should lower our writing standards so people with learning disabilities sound as smart as people without them. If that makes me a bigot, fine. I'm a bigot. 
  • still waiting 2008-01-30 05:56:55 There was a storm coming last night. I got home just as it started, literally. I turned off my headlights and my car rocked to the left from a sudden wind. Raindrops hit a few seconds later. By the time I opened my car door it was like having a very heavy person leaning on the other side. I got it open wide enough to stick a leg out and then the heavy person shoved and smashed my calf in the door. I had to throw all my weight on the door to get out of my car. Then I got inside and found out the wind had blown the door off my closet. Yeah, figure that one out. I knew my windows leaked air, but that's ridiculous. But that's not the worst part. One of the windows in my kitchen got sucked right out of the pane. There's a little fragment of glass left and the rest is just...gone. It's not on the roof so I assume it's shattered all over the front lawn. It's too windy to go out and look.

    Anyway, I was told the winds and sprinkles would be followed by cold and snow. Hasn't happened yet. Oh, it's cold. Very cold considering I don't have a window in my kitchen and the winds haven't stopped at all. But no snow. The snow was supposed to come after the winds stopped. No snow, no wind stopping. So I'm stuck with the wind indefinitely. It's been hours and hours and it's still blowing.

    I put plastic over the window. That was a fiasco. It's right over my sink, so I had to sit half in the sink and half on the counter, sit on top of the plastic so it wouldn't get sucked out the window, and then try to hold the plastic, hold the cardboard strip, hold the nail, and hammer it into place. It took me three hours to get that plastic up. Now I have to go and nail it back into place every half hour because the wind keeps sucking so hard that the cardboard rips. It makes the loudest snapping noises, too, so no hope of sleeping. I was lucky I still had some plastic from when I covered the other windows (they all leak air, I knew that, I just don't own the house so I'm not paying to get new windows - I'm a renter, my landlord is supposed to cover that stuff).

    Now for the worst part. I have to let strangers into my apartment tomorrow to put a new window in. Which meant I had to pick up the place or my mom would have a heart attack (everyone in town knows her, and thus anything her kids do reflects on her, so if my apartment is shabby she looks bad, BS, I know). Well, cleaning kept me awake - which is good because otherwise I'd have lost my plastic by now. I only have one other package of plastic to use if that one gets sucked out - I'd never catch it in time to put it back up. The wind would have it across the street in a tree by the time I heard the ripping noise. And I don't want to have to try putting up another sheet. My poor thumb is all bloodblister from hammering the first time. And my mom had the nerve to show up right after I was done to tell me I did a "good job". Like it would have killed her to lend me a hand. My brother put up the plastic on my other windows and he had to have me hold it for him (plus, he was using a staple gun, and there was no wind jerking it out of his hands) - but she thought I could do it myself with nails when the wind is trying to suck the plastic out the window. Amazing how that works out. I should take it as a compliment that she assumes I'm so much more capable than he is.

    It's been a weird night. Not fun, but...kinda neat. It's my first time getting "storm damage". I just wish I could have seen the window get sucked out. It must have exploded - I found a tiny piece of glass on the carpet - that's four feet from the window - the rest had to have been sucked outside because it is long gone. Kinda cool. Hate to have missed that. I'm still not sure how the closet door got blown off the hinges, though. That window is still intact. o.O Odd stuff.

    I wish the wind would stop. That snapping *still* scares me now and then. It's so loud and violent - like someone's in the kitchen. I'm not used to loud and violent noises at random. All the ghosts ever do is thump on the stairs and rattle the doornob and they only do that when I'm at my desk. They're much more considerate than this mindless wind. Nature. So rude. 
  • head meet desk 2008-01-22 16:20:54 My other forum is down again. Darn it all.

    Every time that happens I hop over here and stick my nose where it doesn't belong. I'm like that loser who graduated years ago and still hangs around campus because it's familiar and safe. Grow up already.

    Darn it all.

    And I finally broke down and wrote up the first chapter of a plot bunny that's been bugging and distracting me for the last two months. It's nothing. It's crap. That's why I haven't bothered writing it. I only did it so it would stop bugging me. Yet, one day after posting it, it's already gotten 45+ reviews - the first half of them starting with "Wow!" Come on, people. Stroke my ego about the fics I actually put effort into. It's not fair. Why is it the harder I try the less appreciation it gets, and when I pull something out of my ass they rave? It's not right. It's just not. Darn it all.

    It's no wonder I'm so darn lazy. The less I try the more they like. Why try at all.

    dia. 
  • vcas etc 2008-01-16 20:26:21 I forgot they existed. Um, yeah. o.o;

    This is the first year where I have absolutely no personal investment in the contest. I didn't watch many vids last year, I don't remember if any of the people I stalk made noteworthy vids and most of them aren't popular enough to make it into the voting even if they did, and of course I didn't make any vids at all last year. Well, one, but we're not counting it. I don't think it ever made it past 100 local downloads. ;p

    That said, I'm really looking forward to getting the semi list of vids. I'm curious to see if anyone's improved since last year. And if effect trends have changed any (for better or worse). I know xvid is almost dead now. Even MEPs that offer two download links only offer mp4 and h2XX, as if someone who can't play one of those would actually be able to play the other. It's too bad. I never did get to watch the yaoi-MEP, let alone do an op for it. I'll have to deal with mp4 vids to watch the vcas, I'm sure. That'll be not-fun. I'll do it though. I have a mind to op the vids that make it into the preliminaries but DON'T make it to the finals.

    Not that I can't play mp4. I can play mp4 vids perfectly fine, thank you. Sh, don't tell. I just don't watch them more than once and thus I don't bother keeping them on my computer. So if it's a video I think I'll like I want an xvid copy. The quality looks like crap when I convert mp4 to xvid, so I prefer the creator to make an xvid copy for me. If they don't, well, I just don't keep that video.

    Which reminds me, I was shocked when I checked on the Yaoi-MEP recently and saw how few reviews it had. I was looking to see if they'd ever got around to putting up an xvid version. They hadn't, just an mp4 copy and a high def copy. Is it any wonder that mep has like 3 reviews? The people who'd actually enjoy and op it can't play it. As a yaoi fan, I think that's absolutely sad. A crying shame. All that yaoi going unappreciated. It's not right. [I refuse to believe the MEP sucks so badly that only 3 or 4 people liked it enough to review it. It's a yaoi MEP and yaoi fans have notoriously low standards. I should know, I'm one of them and I've been making amvs for them for...egh...years now. The last two yaoi con amv contests I went to were littered in horrible videos and the audience still cheered like crazy. Yaoi fans are not picky. At all. Plus, that MEP has some good editors listed. Unless they made their segments while hung over and half asleep, there must be something good in it. At least enough to elicit 10 ops. My "less than 100 downloads" yaoi video that I made last year used Linkin Park and it has 5 ops. No MEP should have less ops than that video. It's not right.] 
  • codecs comps & bubbles 2008-01-09 23:47:27 How is it an MEP can get three pages of mostly positive responses when it's announced and still have only one op nearly a month after its release? Maybe for the same reason the yaoi dream puppets MEP has only 2 ops despite having been released 4 months ago.

    Is it because people stopped opping their own MEPs? Maybe, but in the old days MEPs got more reviews from the fans than they did the editors.
    Is it because the MEPs in question suck too much to get ops? I wouldn't know since I can't watch them.
    Is it because the people who'd actually leave an op can't watch the video? You bet your ass it is.

    Xvid, people.

    What's the point of distributing a video in mp4 to please the people on the forum if they won't review your video? Oh, sure, they might praise your quality on the vid announcement, but that thread is going to be locked and forgotten before long. An op lasts forever. And it shows casual browsers that your MEP was liked by more than 1 or 2 people.

    Good editors putting their time together to make an MEP and having a whopping 3 or less op count. Not because their video sucks. Because they were more concerned with pleasing the people in that announcement thread than they were with the making their video playable to the casual viewer. That's just sad.

    Or do they consider it a fair trade off? Is that one week of forum praise in the announcement thread better than getting continual accumulative praise from silly little bints who wouldn't know great quality from good quality?

    And don't claim you're just weeding out the "lazy" people too stupid to install the necessary codecs/programs/etc in order to view your video. It's not true and you know it. The computer you have matters more than the codecs. You're not weeding out the lazy and the stupid, you're weeding out the poor. That's not the sort of thing you're supposed to brag about.

    I have a great computer. When I bought it - my second year in college when I was living off ramen and working weekends, the day after my very first computer died (an ancient machine given to me because it had a word program that would let me type my assignments without trekking across campus every night, by a very nice professor who didn't equate poorness to laziness), my new computer was the most expensive computer for sale in Evansville. It had everything. It was frickin cool and as high tech as they came. It took me years to pay it off - I was still paying when I graduated. Of course it was new in mid 2003, almost 5 years ago. We're supposed to buy a new computer every 2 or 3 years if we want to watch amvs and anyone who doesn't upgrade is just lazy, right? Yeah. Come out of the bubble.

    It took me years - that's YEARS, plural - to pay this thing off. I could have bought a car instead. I picked the computer because I needed one for school - I lived on campus, with full scholarship thanks to my actually having paid attention in high school, and I could walk to work. Now my car's more important than a fancy new computer when the computer I have now works just as well as it did when I bought it.

    Oh, don't get me wrong. This part of the rant isn't directed solely at the org. My mom commented on my computer recently. She's been on a high tech kick lately. She just bought a shiny new scanner that costs more than my car (a car I'll be paying off for the next 3.5 years). And she had me hook up her new office equipment since she doesn't know how to send an email, let alone plug things in and install software. We were talking about my gradual departure from the amv hobby and came onto the subject of codecs. Which led to computers. And then she realized - my computer is nearly 5 years old. OMG. A 5 year old computer! Who ever heard of such a thing??? Gasp. GaspWheezeChoke. Shock. Why didn't you tell me you needed a new computer??? Oh, you pathetic outdated child! The horror!

    As if she had no idea I spent my first years at college using a freebie hulking monster of a computer that didn't have spellcheck because it didn't exist back when the computer was made. As if she wasn't the one who raised me on 'if it isn't broken, what the hell are you whining about? You're lucky you have one at all, you ungrateful wretch.'

    I was so very annoyed with her. I don't need a new computer. I'm not going to school and I don't use my computer for work. The only thing I'm using my computer for is recreation. And it works perfectly well for that purpose. Yes, it might be nice to have a computer fast enough to play mp4 and the h--- codecs, but it's not worth spending a few thousand just so I can keep up with the org forum. If she wants to spend that much on me in a pity gift, she can pay off my car for me. That'll help me live. I don't need her to help me play.

    Unfortunately, once a person 'makes it' they tend to forget how money works in the real world. Instead of cash to pay my bills, gift cards to feed me, or offering to get my car a checkup which it needs dearly, my dear old 'tech-crazed' mom got me a fancy new monitor for my pathetically 5yr old computer. Um, okay. It's still in the box. It's a flatscreen thing that I'd probably knock over every time I sit at my desk. It looks insanely breakable. I don't want to know how much it costs. The monitor that came with my 'pathetically 5yr old computer' broke a year or two ago and the one I'm using now is from a windows 98 comp I had stored in my closet - one of my mom's discards. It still works as good as it did, oh god, 8 years ago? 10? It's the monitor from the computer my mother had at her office back when I was using that hulking monster at school. Back when she could only afford one computer for her office, and she'd never dream of buying a new one unless absolutely necessary.

    I'll keep that fancy new monitor, but I'm not going to use it if the one I have still works. Why would I? These things don't live forever. If I use that one and it dies after a year, I'll have to switch back to this old 98 monitor I'm using right now. If I keep this old one till *it* dies, I'll have a fancy new one to switch to. That's the real world, bubble-people. If it ain't broke, what the hell are you complaining about? 
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