The moving finger rants

Buggeration. It turns out that there already is a Paul Hamilton, he works for the RSC and is thus more successful and handsome than I, and naturally he's Equity-registered. So I'm not allowed to use my name for professional, performance-related purposes.

Insisting on the A J isn't enough, apparently. The rules have changed since Russell T. Davies or Richard E. Grant. This is Annoying. I don't even like the bloody name—my mother chose it—but the one thing I've always been most successful at was being Paul A J Hamilton, and now I'm not allowed to do that any more.

I need a new name. It's not going to be an issue until someone starts paying me for work, but I suspect it's better to start sooner rather than later.

From now on I want you all to refer to me as Loretta. I can pretty much guarantee that Pajhy McCloakGuy isn't taken.

I'm thinking about dusting off an old roleplaying character, but he's not likely to have sufficient Google presence. George Ominokouhai? Ian Spector Fuckup?

Right, so. Let me see if I've got this right.

It's not okay to touch people's boobs at a comic-con. This is fine, I can understand that.

But it is okay to express why it's not okay to touch boobs at a con by advocating face-punching and nut-kicking, not just directed at the one wanker who suggested the boob-touching, but at all men.

Dear Feminists: kindly fuck off.

I really thought that we were finally getting somewhere. I thought that some of us had penises and some of us had vaginas, but that we looked at each other and we saw people. The rest was details. But no, everything has to be Us vs. Them and everybody has to be categorized into tiny little exclusive boxes. And specifically, all men fall into one of the two categories of Threat or Menace.

This should be a better world, a friend of mine said. A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where [one could] say, Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts, and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.

Nice idea. Then they made the mistake of trying it, which was pretty stupid. Then they made the further mistake of writing about it on the Internet.

About three hundred comments later, it all went horribly wrong.

I was particularly amused by the handful of people who, after two hundred comments all saying brilliant and beautiful and I wish I'd been there, piped up to post this is completely reprehensible and under no circumstances could anyone ever think it was remotely appropriate. And then, when I had the gall to ask a simple question like what distinguishes this from other forms of social interaction, or what's so different about boobs, all I get—from otherwise highly intelligent people whose thoughts I am honoured and privileged to read—is argument by repeated assertion and a whole lot of well if you don't understand, then I'm certainly not going to tell you.

You ever wonder why we filthy men spent centuries thinking you were all stupider than we are? It's because of shit like this. You won't talk to us.

I don't have boobs. I don't know what it's like. This is the Internet. We are having a discussion.

TALK TO US.

The Internet[...] work[s] how [it's] supposed to, crow the militant third-wavers at feministsf. How's that exactly? By stifling debate and restoring the status quo? By screeching the loudest until everyone else backs down?

Now we're back to the 1970s again—in which I'm scared to approach anybody in case they turn into a spitting harpy who tears my groin off when I offer them a compliment; in which men are from Mars and women are from Venus and this is apparently okay because acting like we are members of the same species is apparently beyond people; in which I can't have sex with anyone at all because even if they say yes they're probably just a brainwashed agent of the Patriarchy.

Now we live in a world where no-one is allowed to even think about questioning ingrained social mores, in case people shout at them on the Internet.

Thanks, feminists. I expect you think you've made progress.

ObWondermark.

~

Comments are disabled because when I say talk to us I mean us in general. Don't talk to me. I am tired of dealing with this bullshit and you've all depressed the hell out of me. I'll come back and play when you're capable of treating people as people.

There was a fight this evening. I flung a man headlong through a window.

Because real life isn't like the movies, the window had a grating on it.

I hate being the hero. I'd much rather not have to be.

My grandfather died tonight.

I was thinking, just yesterday, about clouds—I was looking up at the dappled sky, and there was a bit that consisted of water vapour in suspension, and there, right next to it, was a bit that wasn't. Science would suggest that this doesn't happen. Science likes nice, homogeneous point masses, all of which behave in the same way.

If it wasn't for the differences between clouds and not-clouds, if we didn't have these variations and dynamism and vitality in our environment, then life could not exist. Which leads me onto another thought: how do you get weather on the inside of a Dyson sphere? Every piece of ground gets exactly the same amount of radiation as every other piece, and if the sphere is remotely well-constructed then there are no tectonic forces, either. How do you get convection currents when everywhere is the same as everywhere else? How do you prevent stagnation on a mathematically perfect surface?

In an homogeneous, mathematically perfect environment with no variations, life could never arise. Life depends on the differences, the contrasts, the changes and the chaos. Interesting things only ever happen at boundaries. Life is about what happens when differences collide.

My grandfather never understood this. My grandfather spent a great deal of his later years, it seems to me, obsessed with preventing me rocking the boat. Boats, I feel, are there to be rocked. My personal opinions, though, merited no consideration, apparently: as far as he was concerned, the purpose of my existence to preserve the status quo. I remain utterly bewildered at the concept of people who will bring life into this world and then refuse to allow it to live.

Life is about differences.

I said goodbye to my grandfather a long time ago. My grandfather was the war hero with the host of bad jokes, amusing even the fifteenth time you'd heard them, because it was him telling them. The guy who refused to acknowledge my existence as an independent human being is not the same guy. I have no time for that guy.

My grandfather died a long time ago. His body died tonight.

Someone died tonight: not someone with whom I have any connection, but someone who used to be someone whom I used to know. Not my grandfather, not any more: certainly not now.

I still feel like I should do something.

Sometimes, it's only when the older generation die that things change enough for the younger to go on living.

Last weekend stormsearch and I went to Linlithgow. It's twenty minutes on the train, a pleasant walk around the loch, feed the swans, pub lunch, buy interesting foodstuffs, and come back home in time for tea.

(Plus Jehane got savaged by coots. It's worth the price of admission simply for that.)

( This weekend wasn't like that )

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[0] There appears to be a general impression that I exaggerate certain events on my LJ. Not so. I swear I am not making any of this up.

[1] She's the voice of reason.

[2] This is a euphemism.

[3] We tied up in the harbour overnight and left first thing in the morning. I was on galley duty that night and sent one of the staff ashore to get some cream. Apparently the town shuts down at half past four and no cream was to be had anywhere. It was a somewhat runny sausage casserole, but it seemed to do the trick.

[4] Not to mention the traditional `this is going to make for a fantastic LJ entry'. I don't know about that one. You be the judge.

(One of a series, it would seem, of interminable and convoluted ramblings on subjects of which I am probably not qualified to speak.)

Psychotherapy session today included the phrase I have trained you well, young padawan (me to her, natch), and also I'm sorry, I don't mean to patronize—and `patronize', of course, means `to talk down to someone'.

( On personality )

~

On another note: and the Trogdor comes in the NIIIGHT!!! to a river in Mexico.

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[0] I notice that I turned the conversation into a more general academic discussion in order to avoid talking about me. Again. And the shrink didn't call me on it. Bad psychotherapist, bad.

[1] I probably do have a middle gear: it's the one I use when I'm Performing Excellent Customer Service or when Meeting The Parents. It's the socially-mediated gear one uses when one is pretending to be someone else. So it can still be argued that I don't have a middle gear, and in any case it's irrelevant to the succeeding discussion.

[2] Those of you who think I'm treating my taxpayer-funded course of mental healthcare with a degree of flippancy are missing the point. I know what I'm doing, and it's taking years anyway, so I may as well have some fun while I'm doing it. Besides, it's way more entertaining for you lot this way. I live to serve.

[3] I think it was a teacher. It may have been an orthodontist. I have suddenly spotted the problem with the use, as the main thrust of my thesis, of an aphorism I read in a Reader's Digest seventeen years ago.

[4] Actually, what he said was probably something very similar, in Italian.

[5] [3]

[6] I suspect that being able to sing had something to do with it, as well.

Bitch Queen From Hell phoned me this morning. I was icily polite and brusque, and I used the Voice to its full advantage. I said Hello?, then I said What do you want?, then I said Right. Thank you and hung up.

If she still doesn't get the message then I shall go off on a vitriolic diatribe next time. This time it wasn't entirely appropriate to do so, because she was calling to tell me that my grandfather is dying.

The phrase We don't know how long he's got left was used.

What the hell. I'm pissed off with him too.

Until he decided to take sides in the ongoing feud between me and my mother, my grandfather was a wonderful man. Grandpa is a war hero (they are all heroes) and a terribly nice, generous chap with a host of interesting stories and a large stock of terrible, terrible jokes. But he holds some singular ideas about who I should choose to associate with and he lacks the capacity to appreciate my right to make my own decisions. I haven't spoken to him since early last December, and I haven't spoken to my grandmother since the end of February, for similar reasons. In neither case is it because I'm holding an aloof silence or deliberately cutting off contact, it's just so much easier for me not to have to deal with their shit.

I shall continue to get on with my own life, three hundred miles away. None of this is of any concern to me unless my bloody mother tries to call again.

~

I have been subjected to a sooper-sekrit sneak preview of an incomplete version of Bloodspell episode 13. cairmen is desperate for critical feedback before release, for some reason that hasn't been explained. Some of the sound isn't ready yet and at one point there is a SCENE MISSING placeholder card that simply reads, The Master kicks the living crap out of everyone.

I feel quite strongly that they should just leave the placeholder in there. And I sound awesome.

~

Observe this fantastic image of Saturn eclipsing the Sun, as seen from Cassini (larger version here).

Earth is that little dot just inside the G ring at about 10 o'clock. Everything we've ever known is on that pale speck.

If it were up to me, we'd consume all of Earth's resources so that we could get out into space before I'm too old to appreciate it. Perhaps it's a good thing that it's not up to me. But pictures like this remind me that I can still hear the thin gnat-voices crying.

~

On which note: I'm told it was Rupert Brooke—though I've never found the context, said the Air Marshal in Wyndham's version of the far-future year 1998. A five-second google for brooke thin-gnat-voices provides context in an instant.

Remember when we could go to space but we didn't have computers yet? Whatever happened to the good old days?

The other night, after eighteen months, I logged into my university account.

The poor dears have been holding it for me, as if in the vain hope that someday I may return to sort their fucking lives out again. In England's hour of greatest need....

Several thousand unread messages—maybe I'll deal with those another time—and my essays. Oh, my essays.

Some of you may recall the Systems Design Project. Some of you may recall the vomitous torrent of bile, hatred and vitriol that I handed in as my report. The phrases obsolete hardware, could not charitably be described as cutting-edge and dysfunctional group dynamic abound.

( Highlights behind the cut. It's a `best of pajh' retrospective spleen-o-rama, just for you )

The whole thing is here if you're interested. (See, I can `host files' on my `web space' now. I have the technology.) I remain quite impressed that I managed to write 6,127 words and not one of them was `fuck'.

I handed that in and had a nervous breakdown two days later. On reflection, I can't say I'm at all surprised.

~

Oh, and if anyone can tell me what I was going on about in this document, I'd be much obliged if they could tell me. This was the one in which I fixed all of the problems inherent in the current approach to genetic algorithms and suggested a way forward based on common sense and less frenetic mid-nineties grubbing for research money.

I was some kind of fucking genius two years ago. Now I have very little idea what any of those words mean.

I have spent the day on the phone with panicking tourists, trying very hard not to say of course the travel insurance you bought will cover that, selling teethbreesh to replace the ones that Heathrow have (probably) destroyed in controlled explosions, and giving out clear plastic bags. The only plastic bags we have are tiny ones for food use, but since all you're allowed to put in them is a passport I suppose they'll do.

Frantz Fanon, the 20th century revolutionary, contended that the aim of terrorism is to terrify. If that is so, terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrified—that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them.

So what the fuck are the Gubmint up to? Do we have collaborators in the highest ranks of the British Transport Police? I have here in my hand a list of 205 people that were known to the Home Secretary as being scaremongering media-whores, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the check-in desks....

~

Of course, while I'm in the middle of dealing with a Terrorist Crisis, my fucking mother decides to call. But you're miles from Heathrow she claims. Once I'd explained to her the concept of TRAVEL, wherein as a hotel we provide accomodation to people who come from elsewhere, she wanted to know how I was doing.

What? You mean apart from the chronic psychological disorders and social problems you created?

At the end she made me promise to keep in touch, and if you don't, I will. Sounded like a threat to me.

I am so sick of playing nice. Next time, I swear, there will be full disclosure in a speech that will include words like loathsome, self-serving and harridan. And it will end with Now get the fuck off my phone.

~

And all this after a session with the shrink this morning that left me more depressed. She got me to list all the things that made me angry, and I was quite a reasonable way through a list that could take my whole life to relate when she said and that's all we have time for this week. Thanks a fucking bunch.

And I'm back at work for eight in the morning.

I need a drink.

A brief moment of panic was had when the party I was supposed to be attending tonight was slightly sullied by the fact that the attendant Imperial Four-year-old had just contracted chickenpox.

I'm fairly sure I've had chickenpox, but it would be awfully nice to be sure. I have managed to eradicate the vast majority of my childhood memories, and all the other ones happened to somebody else, so it's difficult to tell whether or not somebody who has my name once had a specific disease that would render me immune to any subsequent infection by it. However, in today's recorded society, it should be fairly easy to check.

A brief drop-in to the doctors' turned into a twenty-minute bureaucratic nightmare when they decided not to show me my own records. I was all ready to utter the arcane cantraip that would force their minds to my will[0], but eventually the receptionist took a look at my face and made me an appointment instead.

Bending the minds of receptionists to my will with nothing but a look is somewhat gratifying, but I think it would have been rather cooler had I just walked in and said I'd like an appointment in five minutes time, please. Admittedly, I don't know the cantraip for that, but it worked anyway. We spent the requisite five minutes flicking through the yachting magazine in the waiting room, then I was called through to be informed that the NHS didn't know whether or not I was immune either.

I suppose it was whimsical of me to expect that the NHS might keep accurate, or even adequate, medical records.

There was only one other place to try in this Epic Quest Into My Own Past. I had been trying to avoid this, which I why I just spent that much of everyone's tax money on bothering the NHS in the first place. Still, better a two-minute discussion with a doctor than lingering mental illness and pain. The discussion with the doctor was fruitless, so it was on to the mental anguish and pain.

I suppose it was whimsical of me to expect any kind of straight answer from my mother. Nonetheless, it took four phone calls, innumerable conversational pleasantries delivered through clenched teeth, five cigarettes and a double vodka and coke to find out that she didn't know whether or not I'd had chickenpox, either.[1]

Any claim by my mother of ¬X entails[3] that a fairly safe assumption is X. (There's a representation of this in modal logic, but now is not the right time to check that I've got it right.) So I went to the party on the basis that I was unlikely to contract lurgi from the Emperor, especially since I was unlikely to see him.

The party was marvellous and I had a lovely time. I have been feeling slightly itchy since I was there, but then I've also had an uncontrollable urge to clench my fists and to drink obscene amounts of alcohol, so it's difficult to tell what caused what.

I had a pretty good conversation with the Emperor, too, albeit carefully and from the other side of the room.

(A note to verdandiweaves: before you even start, stop it. You hosted a marvellous party and I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I wouldn't have missed it for anything less than my own yacht (thirty feet or greater). My internal problems are mine to deal with and the fact that there may have been, in this instance, a vague relation between those problems and your invitation is neither here nor there.)

(And a Happy Birthday to you.)

(A note to stormsearch: much of the above goes for you, too.)

(But not the birthday bit, obviously.)


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[0] For those of you who are curious: Data Protection Act Subject Access Request. Use with caution.

[1] She knew that my brother had had chickenpox, six years before I was born, but was apparently unable to recall anything more recent than that. She forgot my name for the first two minutes[2], so I suppose I shouldn't find this surprising.

[2] Those two minutes were the least unpleasant part of the entire debacle. Unsurprisingly. For very small values of least unpleasant.

[3] Original typo of `entrails' possibly somewhat Freudian.