Micah Is My Hero/a roundup of curiosities.

I'm just keeping up with Heroes on BBC2 - ie, only halfway through season 1, not nearly far enough to do a complete Heroes/gender lambast, but I do want to say that oh dear god do I love Micah this evening. Because he won't let single-daddy off the hook. Micah is a small boy who used to live with single-mummy, Niki, and now lives with single-daddy, DL (which I am still disappointed is not spelt properly, ie Dalziel, but hey). Transcript stolen from Shadow Anthology:

DL: It's not my fault you can't keep track of your own stuff.

MICAH: Mom always put my lunch in my backpack every single morning.

DL: Well, I'm not your mom.

MICAH: Yeah, that's for sure.

DL: Micah, this isn't easy.

MICAH: Well, it wasn't easy for Mom either.


Next, some extremely old news I only just stumbled across; an FAC complaint about the practically Aristotelian approach the BBFC has toward the female body. (Text-only, but NSFW). Censorship; it means that if you want to know something about a woman's sex life, you have to ask the BBFC, because women aren't allowed to make films about how it really is. It's a familar story.

I keep meaning to say a few words about a completely different thing that also has to do with governments not giving a shit about women's experiences; Form DS-157 (link is an evil, vile PDF). It should be familiar to anyone who's ever applied for a US work visa. It's included in every batch of paperwork the embassies send out for such ends; it asks if you've ever been in a combat zone, and if you've ever been a victim of war. It asks if you have specialised training in the use of firearms or explosives. This form is given to all applicants, but completed versions are only accepted from men. While I'm aware this is all weed-out-the-terrorists stuff, it's beyond odd to be asked such questions then, twice now, told 'nope, don't give a shit, you're a chick'; I'd imagine it would be odder if I had any 'yes' answers to offer, as many female applicants must.


If you didn't read The Monkeysphere the first time around, the Wong has relaunched it elsewhere. I've not a fucking clue how well it fits with Proper Primatology, but it's a concept I sometimes like to bear in mind; I think it does seem helpful to assume that one can only really be aware of 150 other human souls. Sendalin (the imaginary enemy/shadow side whatsit) says one should keep it to 149 at most, so there's always a clear place in your awareness for that someone you might meet on the highroad. (Sendalin also says that being sensible about love is like being turquoise about puppies, and that he likes his coffee desperate with two spoons of melodrama, so how much stock to put in his ideas is up to you.)


My last-but-one post lied, btw; the green person has told me she reads Marie Claire sometimes! I FAIL .__. But I can still find it creepy & misogynistic that Mr Moran says it's 'reassuring' that Suu Kyi reads it, right?


And the only thing worth reading that has ever been printed about Madeline McCann, ever.

Tasers.

Odd that this should pop up right when I'm digging into writing me some cyberpunk. Tasers are technology shaped like a dream-come-true - a terrible threat that does no real harm, power held with no consequences for the powerless. Except, of course, that we live in the real world, and the corpses are piling up and up.

But that's alright, because they're only used in really tough situations where the only other option would be to use a gun, right? All those corpses are bad people? Right?

There is also evidence to suggest that, far from being used to avoid lethal force, many US police agencies are deploying tasers as a routine force option to subdue non-compliant or disturbed individuals who do not pose a serious danger to themselves or others. In some departments, tasers have become the most prevalent force tool. They have been used against unruly schoolchildren; unarmed mentally disturbed or intoxicated individuals; suspects fleeing minor crime scenes and people who argue with police or fail to comply immediately with a command. Cases described in this report include the stunning of a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Florida, following a dispute on a bus, and a 13- year-old girl in Arizona, who threw a book in a public library.

So, being aware of taser-related corpsepiles already, I was pretty stunned by that chief constable's attitude. "What was it like? Not pleasant, is the answer.[...] I was completely incapable of movement. I would have fallen if I hadn't been supported by my colleagues. I very strongly advise you, if faced by an officer and a Taser, that you follow the instructions of the nice police officer, because you will not enjoy the consequences of disobedience."

Um. That's a pretty dim exercise of power there. I guess when you're the hand behind the trigger, you don't see the need to say "What was it like? Not pleasant, is the answer. I and the others who have the power to do this will use it only as a last resort, will not make idle threats with it, will not treat it as if it is harmless and without consequences, and will not bully the difficult or the incapable with it."

And I'm the hand behind the pen, and have the responsibility of exploring these issues in cyberpunk, which I shall.

dark dreamers.

Forgive me for doing yet more recycling of yesterday's news, but; I think this guy sounds pretty normal. No, really. He would've fit in with my social circle just fine. Just look at the social violations he's accused of there;

-CSI and TV crime dramas - doesn't everyone love those? (Well, except me, I don't watch TV, but that's by the by - everyone else likes them...)

-Violent computer games - I've written about that one already.

-No, really, why the hell is it even mentioning he kept condoms in his room? That's just sensible. (I use the IUS, but I tend to pick up free condoms from sexual health dropins and pass them on to my teenage brother, so often have them around - I seriously can't imagine why the article bothers mentioning this, and furthermore, I'm disturbed as to what message they're trying to send out by doing so).

-reading Wiki pages on serial killers? I did that not long ago - got linked to it from something else. I'm sad, I read about a lot of things on Wikipedia - it's great for getting a general idea of what interested people think about a subject.

-planning massacres, coups, and other atrocities? Check. It's an impulse - whenever I'm made subject to any security procedure, I think about how I'd go about getting around it. I know lots of people do this. I've even done it with friends in airports and railway stations - spoken in detail about how we'd go about sneaking bombs or weapons through scanners or physical searches - which probably constitutes conspiracy, but what the hell. Apart from being a world champion at sneaking water bottles into nightclubs, I've never acted on any of these plots and likely never will. The specific example - planning a coup led by a small number of people in Equatorial Guinea - pinged two parts of my geek radar; there's a Leslie Charteris short story about three people staging a coup in a small South American country; and the flag of Equatorial Guinea is flown by Hagbard Celine, the iconic anarchist and drug dealer who ILLUMINATUS! centres on.

-sword with a 39-inch blade? Check. Hella check. Mine's a WW2 ceremonial army thingy, recently restored to shiny beauty as part of a scurrilous insurance claim, and it's sexy as hell. It's propped up against the dead piano in my bedroom. I use it for killing wasps, mostly, but it makes a great dream-prop too. My partner has a replica broadsword too, and seriously, once you've got metalwork why the heck shouldn't it be a feature of your sexual landscape? (A very small feature, in our case, but like the whole girls-with-guns kink, it's a great arena for playing with power and agency.)

-books about crime and weapons? It's not clear whether this means fiction or nonfiction, but either way you'll find a large section devoted to it at your local bookshop. You'll also find zillions of people glued to Crimewatch etc. The world we live in is obsessed with crime, with media coverage of it only rising as actual instances are falling. Being obsessed with lurking villains is not at all unusual. Honestly, I'm far more creeped out by weirdo SAS obsessives, and I've known several of those.

-then there's this oft-used phrase 'he lived in a fantasy world'; check, but, do you know what? So do you. Everyone sees the world through a filter of dreams and expectations, and these can be wildly divergent even between people who live in close physical proximity; many people see God behind every feature of the world; others have ridiculous, fantastical fears about being targeted by criminals or paedophiles; even the mildest of us sees the world in a way heavily influenced by our habits and memories. We accept the dictates of unseeable forces like money, the law, our perceived society. I keep a ceremonial sword around for handling my near-phobia of wasps, and I barely take care when crossing the road; that's life in a fantasy world. In a more purely geeky sense, I know a lot of people who pay more attention to their fantasy lives than to the day-to-day world around them; sometimes because that day-to-day world is nonexistent, like mine, or mediocre, or fails to satisfy someone's dreams and expectations, or because they simply find more joy in their life as a reader, writer, or gamer than in their life as a worker, student or parent. I think the general cause is that the real world sucks, and a large number of people get through it on a sort of spiritual autopilot while their soul is really dwelling elsewhere.


So, yeah, I find this shock-horror-profile-of-killer not horribly far from home. I'm trying to figure out what that's meant to say about me, or anyone else, and coming up blank. Dissecting the habits and possessions of a killer, trying to discern the shape of his dreamworld and classify it as intrinsically harmful, is a futile exercise. I don't think there's such a thing as an incorrect thought, dream or emotion - even the darkest of such things are true, genuine, and in and of themselves do no harm. What I think is really revealed here is that the line between dark dreamings and evil doings is - while not a fine one, not in the least, it's a very clear and wide stripe in the sand there - alarmingly easy to cross if you want to. This, dadada, is also not news.