Gl�delig Jul

Attn: Snow.
Your attendance record in the past few years has been abysmal. You have less than twenty-four hours to materialize in the Midwest or there will be consequences.

Attn: All Others
I'm off to Iowa and might or might not post until next year. Merry Twinkle-Solstice Time!

yami · 18:07 · 21 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Announcements

Excel and the Economics of Usability

Your default Microsoft Office toolbar has the "print" and "print preview" buttons located right next to each other. Why d'you suppose this is? I "customize" my toolbar experience by removing the print button, but this is periodically rejiggered to the default configuration by a computer migration or inexplicable Windows event. Whereupon I immediately start printing at least five spurious copies of everything, every time I need to preview the formatting.

Is Microsoft in cahoots with printer-toner manufacturers?

yami · 9:39 · 20 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: I Hate Everything

Someone Has a Small Internet

In the ongoing saga of how Google brings you into serendipitous contact with the fluffy blanket infinity of the universe... a while back someone typed the name of an old compatriot into the spout box. Said compatriot is now in Morocco with the Peace Corps. Just to show that you can't hide from the Googlebot:

"one) swearing in was a BLAST. the ambassador is a total dork and for his speech he simply googled all our names and had us stand one by one while he announced his findings. he was surprisingly accurate. if anyone knows how to contact [the estimable Y. McMoots], they should tell her that she was mentioned in the peace corps november 2020 swearing in by the american ambassador. i'm sure she'll be happy."

So as an indirect result of this, I've just spent a few minutes combing through livejournals of people I might've known in high school, one year younger and one clique removed, trying to guess who they were. After realizing that there were too many art club drama boys named Joe, two or five or N, kids I barely knew anyway, I gave up. There are really very few good outcomes from such a pursuit.

Onward!
(more...)

yami · 17:31 · 19 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Fan Mail

Pink

If it had a diesel engine, this would be my new car. How on earth could I resist a pink convertible grease-powered jalopy with the Powerpuff Girls painted on its side? Particularly as my car is in the shop, again, to deal with leaking brake fluid, again - this time they're reconfiguring the muffler so it doesn't scrape against the brake line and cause leaks every two months. I'm being nickled and hundred-fifty-dollared to death.

Never mind the car troubles, though, I've been thinking today about my relationship with the color pink. It's the only color with enough social meat to form an actual relationship with, the only color that pushes back at you and refuses to accept whatever implications you care to rhapsodize into it. Squealing over a pink car is definitely a betrayal of my adolescent self. And it's not that I've secretly wanted to love the color pink all this time, but was too ashamed - pink is fine, but for genuine aesthetic enjoyment I'll take a nice green car any day. Obnoxious pink things are just a big girly "fuck you" - and driving around a big "fuck you" is loads of fun! But I'm not quite certain who, exactly, I would be supposed to be fucking with that sort of a car*.
(more...)

yami · 12:51 · 17 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Feminism

Top Five in 2020

It's not so much a choice between applying to grad school and blogging; procrastination is a foregone conclusion. It's a choice between procrastiwhinyblogging about application essays as the retroactive construction of a mendaciously coherent personal narrative (yawn) or doin' some easy stuff. Hugo importunes us all to share our most marvelous self-absorptions of the year; the year ain't over yet, but hell! I hereby promise not to write anything worthwhile until 2020, so that the following posts (in chronological order) can remain my favorites:

  1. An Open Letter to the Campbell's Soup People - Frankly I'm in awe of your legal team, because remember what happened when word got out as to how ketchup was counted as a vegetable on school lunch menus?
  2. Life of the Mind - [W]e can expect some level of activism/intellectualism from Average Citizen X, and anyone who goes beyond that level can fairly claim to be an activist or an intellectual.
  3. Spoons - The spoon is a puddingvore, honed by years of evolution to subsist primarily on yogurt, tapioca, and applesauce.
  4. Easy Things that Aren't - We all have our mental blocks, after all, and most of the time we manage to muddle through life anyway.
  5. Abortion Post Alpha - When someone else's life depends on your body, just how far up shit creek are you allowed to leave them?

So now: All the cool kids are making Top N lists! You don't want to be left out in the cold, do you? I didn't think so.

Another skunk must've just sprayed in the neighborhood. Holy crap I am sick and tired of skunk spray wafting in on the breeze, seems like every other week something trundles in from the mountains and becomes very upset at what it sees. Altadena seems like a nice little unincorporated community, but it just goes to show, if you're not looking at the world through a skunk's eyes, you're missing out. Phlugh.

yami · 22:59 · 13 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Wanking

Architeuthis sox

architeuthis_sox.jpg

What, you need context? Context is for chumps. You're all just lucky that my proper work computer crashed, and the one I'm working on today doesn't have Illustrator installed.

yami · 16:58 · 13 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Whimsy

In Which I Join the Establishment

Not only have large chunks of my favorite slang been co-opted by The Man (one of my managers said "ginormous" this morning)... I'm drinking decaf. Which ranks high among betrayals of my adolescent self, right after admitting that it might be kinda fun to go to a high school reunion. But, y'know, flying high on caffeine doesn't feel like boundless bouncy determination anymore; it just feels like stress.

Sigh.

yami · 11:58 · 13 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal

Abortion Post Omega

Not really, but at Alas (and subsequently Mousewords) there's been discussion of an essay which attempts to take precisely the opposite of my preferred approach to abortion rights: namely, it considers the problem of fetal value in a hypothetical universe where it cannot be counterbalanced by a right to bodily integrity. And then gives a bunch of straw men a good drubbing for displaying the wrong emotions about such a universe (or possibly they're tin men in this instance, since they evidently have brains and need hearts).

I'm explicitly uninterested in the question of fetal value (and implicitly uninterested in the Lakoffish blah-de-blah about whether or not it's politically savvy to display such an interest) but this is so precisely opposite my thinking that I feel obliged to point it out.

yami · 12:24 · 9 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Abortion

Old Enough to Buy My Own Candy

  1. Why did they not have caramel apples coated in M&Ms and/or cookie crumbs and/or coconut when I was a kid? Is this a new innovation in candy, or a cultural problem with the Midwest, or what?
  2. No one at Francis's is answering the question that obviously follows up a question like this:

    Have I also mentioned that, cussing aside, I've always been sentimental about yuletide, even when I was really too young to actually be sentimental about anything?

    So I'll bring it up here. Just how old is old enough to actually be sentimental?

  3. The Posada was lovely; the incongruities of candlelight on busy stretches of Colorado Blvd. were more than balanced out by the gut-wrenching combination of Architecture! Music! Death! at the entrance to several churches. Thanks to all who donated; the organizers weren't completely on the internet ball and didn't send any notices of internet donations until Thursday evening-ish, but I know of at least $50 - way more than I was expecting! Anyone who gave and would like a cute thank-you postcard, send me your address.
  4. I bought myself an album of Christmas music the other day. It claims to be chock full of authentic-esque Medieval and Renaissance yuletide hymns, and the cover features a guy in a doublet and sunglasses. Early music with the fashion sensibilities of a cheesy 80s movie! What's not to like about that, particularly when it's in the $1.99 bin?
    It doesn't quite live up to either the pre-Baroque or the 2020s, but at least the generic arrangements are of Gloucestershire Wassail rather than Here We Come A-Wassailing.
  5. Happy Hanukkah, to those of you who don't remember; also to those of us who only remembered because it's on our office calendar, along with the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and Eddie Vedder's birthday.
yami · 17:38 · 7 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Links, Music, Food

An N Things Post: N=2, Politics

  1. Been meaning to link to two posts as Mousewords on feminism as a frame for the Democratic party: I: bouncing off the marginalization of women in the punditry and II: a succinct followup:

    You cannot reply to accusations that your side doesn't have a vision of family and sexual morals with morals involving economic justice and war. Yes, those are moral values. But the war seems far away and economy too far out of control. Gender issues and family issues are things that are part of every person's life.

    Liberals can't see [the Republican success from endorsing machismo (I mishmashed the quotes a bit here, one paragraph from each post --y)] because of the distancing of liberalism from feminism. Liberal men are invested in the male mystique, too, and don't want to openly align themselves with "feminized" politics of equality. We don't speak the essential language of gender and we get our asses kicked repeatedly.

    Not much to say other than "Yaaaaaa! Grr!" - it's an oversimplified framework, but I'm not giving in to the urge to marginalize feelings of righteous anger in favor of fitting this post into the conventional point-counterpoint. It's a bullshit dialectic, yo.

  2. Dad went to high school with Mike Johanns, and I've been thinking of ways to parlay this tenuous connection into something sparklingly witty or even just a few moments of attention. But no one seems to be very excited about the USDA, so it's been tricky. Sigh.
yami · 13:14 · 6 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Links, Feminism, USian Politics