nixsight

In #MOMBcast 19, we talked about the following comics:

@JamesMOMB
15:40 Captain America Reborn #6 (Ed Brubaker/Bryan Hitck/Butch Guice)
22:00 Robocop #1 (Rob Williams/Fabiano Neves)

@JaneMOMB
32:00 Madame Xanadu #19 (Matt Wagner/Joëlle Jones)
37:00 Demonic #1 (Robert Kirkman/Marc Silvestri)
47:00 Tracker #1 (Jonathan Lincoln/Francis Tsai)
55:00 45 (Andi Ewington/Various)

@Nixsight
59:00 Detective Comics #861 (Greg Rucka/Jock)
01:03:05 Batman & Robin #7 (Grant Morrison/Cameron Stewart)
01:06:30 Thor #606 (Kieron Gillen/Billy Tan)
01:08:30 Kick-Ass #8 (Mark Millar/John Romita Jr)

01:19:00 Nocturne Hotel (Eddie Robson/Simon van Alphen)
01:20:30 PJANG (Rol Hirst/Various)

01:24:30 Tintin – Secret of the Unicorn/Red Rackham’s Treasure (Hergé)

Nocturne Hotel: Purchase at Lulu.com
Rol Hirst & PJANG: http://rolhirst.co.uk/

MOMBcast 19 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/

In #MOMBcast 18, we talked about the following comics:

@nixsight
12:00 Joe The Barbarian #1
20:00 Spider-Woman #5

@Chris_TOMP
30:00 Spider-Woman #5
37:00 Thunderbolts #140

@JaneMOMB
54:00 Joe The Barbarian #1
56:00 Neonomicon Preview

@JamesMOMB
01:05:00 The Outsiders
01:07:30 Dark Avengers #13

01:18:00 S.W.O.R.D cancellation whinge
01:29:00 Daredevil by @Chris_TOMP

MOMBcast 18 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/

In #MOMBcast 17, we talked about the following comics:
@RichMOMB
18:00 Die Hard Year One #4
23:10 Daytripper #2

@JaneMOMB
30:30 Talisman #3
33:00 Dingo #1 & #2

@nixsight
44:00 Invincible Iron Man #22
51:00 S.W.O.R.D #3

@JamesMOMB
01:02:00 Weekly World News #1
01:12:00 Punisher@ Get Castle

01:35:00 45 Blue Spear one-shot chat.
01:40:00 The Siege#1 & Siege Embedded #1

MOMBcast 17 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/

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The post I sent out yesterday, about my problems with the way articles about gang-rape and prostitution were being written at both the BBC and The Guardian, was more controversial than I had intended, garnering a comment from a gentleman I hadn’t heard of before, Julian Real, which sought to come down quite heavily on me over some perceived issues with my argument.

Though I was initially quite shaken by the comment – aggressively worded criticism always gets the adrenaline flowing in uncomfortable ways, after all, especially when you’re too responsive to verbal bullying like I am – and people told me not “to feed the troll”, in Real’s arguments I actually saw some places where I could make my points more clearly, and also gained a little more confidence in the points I was initially hoping to make, as well.

I know I sometimes appear quite opinionated, but personally at least, I’ve always seen an initial statement as a jumping off point, from which all the people in a discussion can inform, correct and self-correct, and my opinions, though idealistically quite consistent, are always fluid where details, clarification and validation are concerned.

So Mr Real’s comment gave me the opportunity to look over what I’d written, and explain what I meant on the bits he disagreed with, and that’s been a fun exercise. I don’t think I will have changed his mind, but then, that’s not really what I hope to do to people. I barely know my own mind – it’d be a bad idea to try and change anyone else’s.

Anyway, I was quite happy with my response to his comment here, but then I realised that I didn’t know what he’d said over at his site. If he’d pointed his readers at my post, and his comment, I didn’t want my clarifications to pass them by. So over I went.

The first paragraph said this:

I found this silly blogpost today. And I responded. The the post by nixsight follows, and where I found it can be seen by clicking on the link in this sentence. On his own blog, his words are not so rudely interrupted by mine. But that was then, and this is here.

Things kind of went downhill from there.

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I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.
Why men use prostitutes

There’s a lot wrong with that sentence. For a start, the fact that there’s no “just” in between “not” and “feminists” is telling.

It’s a peculiar sort of person who will take the words of obviously confused or disturbed individuals, and draw conclusions that pull in a whole gender. Or even a whole subset of a gender.

One can’t conclude from the words of a suicidal female office worker that all office workers are suicidal, let alone that all women are.

I’m getting a little bit tired of sex-negative writing at the moment. For sure, there is trafficking and abuse in the sex industry, and something should be done about it, but we – and certainly, The Guardian – should be at the point where the discussion is more insightful and specific, and less blunt and general.

Certainly, it may say something about how objective a writer wants to be when they are using data from a very limited survey, and not giving much away about how they came across the responders.

There are many erudite and pragmatic ex and current sex-workers writing on and off the internet. There’s really no excuse any more to use the word “prostitute” as short-hand for “trafficked” or “exploited”. Even if it’s the case that the majority of people in the industry are either one of those things, applying that sort of binary thinking to the issue isn’t moving discussion of it along at all.

I’ve realised today that my relationship with The Guardian is similar to the one I had with the NME – in that I started reading both at around the same point in my life, and allowed myself to identify with them a little – but for some reason I never grew out of the former the way I did the latter. Helpfully, the paper’s online provision is sorting that out.

(Cross-Posted from Tumblr)

Maybe it’s rash to read the suggestion that all men are potential rapists as a negative? It suggests that the word “potential” carries destiny within it, when actually it contains choice.

At roughly the point historically that we started telling young women that they had the potential to be anything, we started telling young men that they had the potential to be rapists.

Is it possible that culturally we were just aiming low for our boys? The word “potential” doesn’t speak to any real likelihood – a child may have the potential to be president of the USA, or an astronaut, but it doesn’t mean they will be.

Still, it does seem to be a little sad that women had their notional horizons broadened for them, while men had theirs cut right down.

So championship communicator Jeremy Nicholas apparently had a problem getting into a Cineworld cinema with his laptop.

Now, this sort of story always gets people frothy. For a start, we don’t like being told what to do by someone operating as an automaton on the part of a faceless organisation, not least because the things they end up telling us to do are generally a little bit stupid.

When piracy is invoked, it gets our blood up that little bit more. Those of us who don’t drink at the furry cup of illicit movie file-sharing see it as an attack on our civil liberties, and that we are innocents being treated as criminals. Those of us who are evil, reprehensible, filthy pirate file-sharing pirate-pirates have normally worked out our own tissue-thin rationalisations of why it isn’t a proper crime anyway, and proclaim that if the entertainment industry deserved our money, we’d be happy to spend it.

The entertainment industry holds no truck with the second point of view, and in dealing with the first uses child-protection logic – that it doesn’t matter how many innocent people are inconvenienced or abused, if it means that just one single movie goes unmolested.

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One of the recurring problems when it comes to promoting or even supporting any new technology or idea is the fact that people tend to polarise on the subject of anything outside of their sphere of experience. Pundits will make broad and binary statements about a system, or will publish research that uses a truncated metric on systems that have multiple uses and user bases.

Or to put it more bluntly, in an effort to quantify or place a currency on new concepts or ideas, otherwise intelligent people will sometimes feel compelled to talk with authority on subjects on which they have little or no experience or working knowledge.

We all do this – it’s an ingrained part of the human condition to trust what you know, and mistrust what you don’t – so there’s no sense getting too smug about it, but it’s something that working in any tech area, where things are changing and moving forward all the time, you see constantly. It’s something of an occupational hazard.

In the case of Twitter, this has been exacerbated by the intense media hype and attention it has been under.

Graham Linehan has written a post discussing the downside of forming an opinion so publicly under these circumstances.

“Like a lot of Web 2.0, Twitter is as good as the people on it, and uninformed pieces like Jackie’s continue to fool otherwise bright people into thinking that it’s some sort of “I’m having a sandwich” announcement service. Certainly, there are people on Twitter who might use it this way…and more power to them if it makes them happy… but there are also journalists, scientists, humorists, magazines, newspapers, authors, and Samuel Johnson. There are Mums, Dads, soldiers, doctors, nurses, firemen, base jumpers, astronauts, old people, young people, builders, boxers, cops and at least one tank (don’t ask)…
…We are sharing links to thought-provoking articles, we are making each other laugh, we are keeping each other up to speed on current events…we are communicating with each other on a platform that encourages good manners, that rewards us when we’re interesting and lightly smacks our hand when we’re not.”

Ironically, Linehan and many other Twitter users are not beyond forming such rash and polarised opinions on subjects and issues, but then, that’s kind of the point. Twitter doesn’t form or deform personalities – it’s far too simple a system to do anything of the sort – all Twitter does is provide a venue for communication, and allow them to create micro, macro or meta communities for them to socialise in.

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I love a good musical, me. I also really like Girl One’s family, and having stuff done for me.

A couple of weeks back – on Saturday 16/05/2009 – I experienced a perfect confluence of these three things, when Girl One and I went to London on a day-trip – long arranged by the Girl herself, and all but forgotten by me – to see Les Miserables at Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue with her parents, sister and brother in law.

It was a relatively early weekend start for us – and coming just a week after the lack-of-sleep fest of the Bristol Con the week before, I’ve found I’m still recovering a couple of weeks later. Still, early or no, we managed to get to Waterloo around 10.30, only a little bedraggled and hungry.

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A bit of a diversion this week, because… well, because the urge took me, and I had to take it back…

I’ve loved They Might Be Giants for such a long time, but it’s a peculiar kind of love. They are the loyal, cute and intelligent friend that I forget about from time to time, but when something reminds me of them, I have to seek them out instantly, nervously concerned that they won’t remember me. A quick search reveals that so much has changed in their lives – like a new album that I knew nothing about. I wonder how much they’ll have changed.

Then, of course, it turns out that they do remember me. And even though they’ve got more stories to tell, we easily fall into the same old conversations.

Oh, god, They Might Be Giants are my Cookie.

Anyway, people know the band for a lot of things that the band aren’t. It isn’t their fault, or the band’s, really. The closest they ever got to fame were with two songs that could easily be described as novelty hits, and that’s the sort of peculiar celebrity that can kill an otherwise long-lived group.

In fact, those two songs – “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Istanbul” – though characteristic of the band’s output musically, and a lot of fun, aren’t typical TMBG tracks, though Birdhouse comes close. If all of their output had that same crowd-pleasing infectious appeal, and that was all they had going for them, I would have loved them for the length of the glorious summer of 1990, but I don’t know if they’d still resonate with me as much as they do today.

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