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History, Science, and Animals

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This entry is part 36 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Short list today. I’ve been too busy to really take in as much as I usually do.

I’ve never been interested in being a programmer. At least not since the “good old days” of BASIC where I toyed with the idea briefly, just like everyone else, until I realized just how much ridiculously complex work would be involved in anything I wanted to do and how much the language just wouldn’t stick in my head. (It was also a lot harder to find reference material back then, being there was no Internet everywhere…)

In college, programming was one of the things that really did me in during my first major. I’m fully congnizent of what it can do, but I’ve just never been all that good at making it do it. Aside from the most basic “Hello World!” print tests, churning out anything else that was even vaguely useful was an uphill battled ending in the discovery of another hill.

Guess what I’ve been neck deep into doing for the past month at my day job?

Yeah, more programming than I’ve ever wanted to.

The good news is, thanks to the easy reference material brought directly to my eyeballs via copious Google searches, I’ve managed to just about complete the project. I’m sure it’s not done in the most elegant way, but it’s getting done.

It’s just stressing me all the hell out.

So, not much brain bandwidth for much else…

Community News, Wolverine, a lot of Culture Talk, Some Science, a Little Food, and The Wonder Years Reunion

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This entry is part 37 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I was asked in a comment stream today why I post (or, technically, share… since other people have found most of them first) the articles I do, especially about the whole misogynist culture stuff that’s really being talked about a lot right now.

The answer is simple: Awareness needs to grow.

I know far too many people–myself included–who either are or were blind to how their actions impact the lives of others.

You can’t consciously change things you don’t know you’re doing.

I can’t make anyone improve themselves. But I can at least, maybe, give them some insight into their own actions. (I know, long ago, I was utterly shocked at many of the things I was doing without realizing it.)

We can’t make anyone do anything… not without a whole lot of negatives that outstrip the positives. Plus, unless there’s a critical mass of awareness and will to begin with, forced change never sticks.

This is part of the build up to that critical mass of awareness and will to change.

If just one or two people are shaken awake, realize what they’re doing isn’t what they think they’re doing, and make personal change, then there is progress.

There’s always more than one or two people who are shaken awake.

In the particular case of this issue of entrenched male privileged and misogynist culture, we’re talking about something that is even more entrenched than racism or homophobia. It goes back thousands of years and is built into political discourse and religion like nothing else.

But just because we’ve never known a time that was different, doesn’t mean we can’t try to be better than we (as a species) have ever been before when it comes to equality.

That right there is the beauty of free will and not being trapped and controlled by our biology alone.

So, yeah, I think it’s kind of important.

More Than a Weekend’s Worth of Stuff

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This entry is part 38 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Missed another Friday of posting the (week)daily feed. Ended up out and about late into the night catching the “best of” showings of the 48 Hour Film Project films. Some very, very impressive things were made in that weekend. (And, hey!, I even know some people who made one of them! You can find that in the feed below.)

The rest of the weekend was ridiculously low-key. Mostly spent catching up on some shows, a backlog of email (lots of YouTube video notifications), and playing a few too many hours of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat (both nostalgia-fueled Steam purchases, since they were on sale when I bought them… I’ve been reminded why I stopped wasting quarters at the arcade).

The quiet weekend was shaken out by another high-stress day at the office, thanks to near-impossible deadlines and technology seemingly conspiring against me at every turn. And totally capped off by the bus I normally catch not even showing up and the second one on the route running just slow enough to make me miss my connecting bus to home by about three minutes (gotta love it when you can see the bus pull out of the pickup area and onto the main road).

Oh, and my sunglasses broke. (And, apparently, they were my backup pair… I usually have two pairs hanging around, just in case… seems I forgot to restock last time.)

It hasn’t been that great of a day.

https://www.facebook.com/kierduros/activity/10152073399765981

FCC Overloaded, Rough Road to College, Red Velvet Mites of Love, Genderless, and Slenderman Delusions

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This entry is part 39 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

One of the strangest bits of news that came through today (amid a crazy work schedule and some really annoying Facebook problems), was the story of two 12-year-old girls who stabbed another 12-year-old “friend” of theirs in an attempted murder.

They did it, the article said, to gain the favor of the Slender Man and earn the comfort of getting to hang out with him in his mystical mansion in the woods.

In a word, that’s crazy.

For those who don’t know, Slender Man is a meme that kind of got out of control. Started in a “make something creepy” flavored thread on an online message board. He’s kind of taken on a life of it’s own, growing far beyond the confines of that one thread and making appearances in videos, art, and even computer games.

Apparently now he’s a focus for human sacrifice, too.

And that’s just sad.

Delusional is as delusional does, but at least most delusions in the past have been based on things that aren’t as easily dismiss-able (or searchable) as being, well, genuine fakes. Angels, demons, aliens, even most other urban legends, all have their origins buried in generations of ambiguity. Slenderman’s creation is documented on a Wikipedia page that’s one of the first things that comes up when you search for him.

If these kids can’t make the distinction between something that obviously made up and reality, it’s no wonder they have no problem with the idea of killing someone they called a friend.

There’s no connection to reality, let alone real-world cause and effect or empathy, to be found here.

At least not yet.

Maybe something more… human… will emerge if the case proceeds and the media covers it with any sensibility.

The one vaguely positive thing here is that it’s not the media fishing for a cause… this whole Slender Man motivation is apparently what the girls explained when they were caught.

Authenticity, Spooked, For the Love of Villains, Poor Decisions Make the News, and Taking Risks

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This entry is part 40 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

One of the articles today talks about how keeping our kids super safe may actually be doing them more harm than good.

It raised the question in the comment thread of just how much has the world changed since I was a kid? On a macro level, sure, lots of changes–we’ve got no more Soviet Union (and a whole lot of new countries in its place), gay marriage is a real thing now, 3D movies are the norm and not the novelty–but people are still people. How much, and in what ways, has that changed?

The biggest difference I see is the sheer level of paranoia. There was an article a week or so ago that was by a parent who was facing a lot of court costs because her kid and a friend wandered over to a nearby shopping center. They weren’t supposed to, but that’s beside the point. The point was that the person who came across these two reported very capable young girls panicked and, instead of calling the parents to see what was up, called the cops instead. That escalated quickly and has caused no end of trouble.

Forty years ago, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened.

We’ve become so afraid of everything–especially personal liability–that, in general, we seem to be far too willing to pass things on to someone else (like the cops) in order to avoid having to deal with any real responsibility. This is the same kind of thinking that’s neutered playgrounds (I know I’m not the only one who remembers getting nasty splinters while flying off of a merry-go-round that four other kids were pushing at near sonic speed).

As today’s article says, it’s in those unstructured (and unsupervised) times of play that kids really start to figure things out for themselves. They learn self control. They learn how to work with others. They learn that trying to stand on the top of the jungle gym probably isn’t a good idea (as they bounce down among the bars). Yeah, we’d go home bruised, and sometimes there’d be a broken bone, but we’d heal and not be likely to make the same mistakes again.

But I grew up in the era of the Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger. Both things that, in retrospect were blown so far out of proportion (the first never having a shred of actual evidence to support it, the second being provably wrong as most “danger” comes from family and friends of the family). That planted the seed of fear in us. As we’ve grown up, and, in some cases begun raising families of our own, that fear seems to have sprouted and begun to strangle all the unstructured play time in the name of “being safe.”

Surely we won’t know for another few years (maybe decades) exactly what the ultimate result of helicopter parents and over-planned childhoods will bring… but I have a feeling we’re not at all going to be happy with what we see.