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Tuesday, November 4, 2003
Porn explained 
| | Eric Raymond bluntly explains porn to Naomi Wolf, whose Porn Myth piece he finds disagreeable. While Eric barely touches Wolf's concerns about the effects of porn on women, he does nail some rarely spoken yet basic truths about men and porn: |
| | Ms. Wolf, here is some simple advice you can give any woman who thinks she can't compete with porn. First item on the checklist: is she fucking him? If the answer is "no", then I regret to inform you that her grounds for complaint against the fact that he likes to jack off while looking at or thinking about pictures of porn babes are nil. Zip. Zero. You might as well try resenting water for flowing downhill. |
| | On the other hand, if she is fucking him, he is not going to swap that for feelthy pixels. Trust me on this. I have a penis. I've been fucking women for nearly thirty years, and not once was I even remotely tempted to trade an actual roll in the hay for a fantasy image and my hand. Not even as a confused adolescent, and not even with the ones who were, relatively speaking, lousy in bed. |
| | Any woman who thinks this is happening is evading a problem with the relationship, not with his sexual response. By pointing at porn, she is giving herself leave to ignore real issues. Like: am I joyful in bed? This has nothing to do with facials or Brazilian wax jobs — and, actually, as much to do with the capacity to receive pleasure from that man's touch as the capacity to give him pleasure. |
Sometimes shit *really* happens
| | It's a perfect day here in Santa Barbara. That withstanding, sewage backed up into our first floor, and there's shit everywhere. Literally. |
| | But plumbers are on the case. Life crawls on. |
Nouvelle Novell?
| | Of course I'm covering the matter for Linux Juornal. If any of ya'll want to help by providing useful information or perspectives, email me. Thanks. |
Blogvertising
| | I don't know any of us who are getting rich in the blog ad game. I just started running the things two months ago. All told it's about $100 a month. And I still have to think about adding BlogAds to the mix at some point. But basically, it's just preparing the ground for what's coming down the road. |
Gets my vote
| | I do not believe that we should be willing to buy or use voting systems where the source code and design is not open for public review. I think there are companies that would be willing to work in this model, particularly if the contract provided some long term commitments. This is not Britney Spears we're talking about here — the integrity of our voting system is a fundamental component of our government. |
Clarifications
| | The boy, seven, was playing with his Magic 8-ball in the back seat of the car. Except it wasn't a real Magic 8-ball. It was schwag: a promotional giveaway that I had picked up at a trade show last week. Bearing the name of some company (I forget which, for such is the persistent irony of promotional give-aways), it was barely bigger than a real 8-ball from a pool table. And it didn't work very well, since the floating answer polyhedron lacked sufficient buoyancy to press its flat surfaces flush against the viewing window. |
| | "What does 'indications' mean, Papa?" he said. |
| | "Evidence. Like, 'There are indications that the sun will shine today.'" I went on to give even more complicated explanations, with lots of long words the kid asked me to define. |
| | "Oh. It means signs," he said. |
| | The kid's curiousity takes the form of constant questioning. His thirst for knowledge is never slaked, always equally serious and fun. The way he makes his world forces me to remake mine. |
| | All this came to mind as I read Emerson this morning: |
| | The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear. |
| | That from Self-Reliance, which is what I believe the networked world is fundamentally about. It's about enlightenment — our own and that of everyone willing to reflect and enlarge it. |
| | Reading Emerson, I also hear Whitman: |
| | Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams.
Now I wash the gum from your eyes.
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Long have you timidly waited,
holding a plank by the shore.
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again,
and nod to me and shout,
and laughingly dash your hair.
I am the teacher of athletes.
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own
proves the width of my own.
He most honors my style
who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.
I concentrate toward them that are nigh.
I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day's work
and will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me.
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. |
| | That's blogging, folks. Barbaric yawps from untamed hawks, soaring through a hurricane of packets over the roofs of a civilization that mostly still doesn't know which way the wind blows. Or what it is that holds these birds aloft. |
| | But it's dawn, and soon we'll all habit ourselves to this light, this wind, this weather of our own making. |
| | That's when we'll meet the old man: |
| | The last scud of day holds back for me.
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any
on the shadowed wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the desk.
I depart as air.
I shake my white locks at the runaway sun.
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt and grow
from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
And filtre and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
Missing me one place search another
I stop some where waiting for you.
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Mo'rora
| | NASA's Aurora Gallery now includes a pile of pix from 31 October: Halloween night. There are submissions from New York, North Carolina, France, Utah, South Carolina, Alabama, Belgium, Colorado, Maryland, California, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas, Victoria, Australia, ... |
| | And this one, from 17 miles north of Mexico, east of San Diego.The photographer stood on the desert, shaded by mountains from the rain that was drenching both the burning and the populated parts of Southern California to his west and northwest. Those blocked from the view included me and my kid, the two astronomy freaks, as we walked door-to-door under umbrellas, in shoes so wet they squished, trick-or-treating in heavy rain. |
| | Ah, but now there's this: |
| | AURORA WATCH: A coronal mass ejection en route to Earth is expected to sweep past our planet on Nov. 4th and perhaps spark a new round of auroras. The CME (movie) was hurled toward Earth by an X8-class explosion from sunspot 486 on Nov. 2nd. |
| | One more chance, folks. One more chance. |
| | The huge sunspot that produced this light show is rotating to the back side of the Sun now, meaning there probably won't be another CME for another month or so at the very earliest, provided the sunspot is still active, which is hardly a sure thing. |
| | So tonight is a good night to watch again. My guess is that Europe has the best shot at a view. |
| | IMPACT: A coronal mass ejection swept past Earth on Nov. 4th at approximately 0630 UT. So far the impact has done little to spark auroras, mainly because the interplanetary magnetic field near Earth is tilting north--a condition that suppresses geomagnetic storms. The CME (movie) was hurled toward Earth by an X8-class explosion from sunspot 486 on Nov. 2nd. |
| | I love SpaceWeather.com; but I would love it a lot more if I could link to text that wouldn't go away. That would happen if SpaceWeather.com adopted a blog format with permalinks for each posting, and put out an RSS notification with each new posting as well. The way it's set up now, bulletins like the one above go to oblivion when new ones come along. |
| | SpaceWeather.com's author, Dr. Tony Phillips, has a phone notification system for Space Weather Alerts and Backyard Astronomy Alerts, which are $4.95 and $6.95/month, respectively. Dr. Phillips could still maintain that service, and probably make a lot more money from it, if each bulletin sent out an RSS notification, and continued to live with a permalinked address in an archive. That way thousands of guys like me could link to specific bulletins, and the net effect would be hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers arriving at SpaceWeather and Dr. Phillips' paid services by way of searches on Google and elsewhere. |
| | If he's worried about giving away what he also sells, he should look to Technorati, which lives entirely in the RSS world, and also charges (way too little) for sending out WatchLists to subscribers. |
| | I don't think it would be a huge hack for Dr. Phillips to make the change. The world is thick with software that will do the job. |
| | It would make an outstanding service even better. |
I want one
| | I don't know why, but something perverse (sleepiness, probably) makes the person in front of me want to recline their seat when nobody else in the whole row (or the whole damn plane) is doing the same. |
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