I don't really get comments on this blog, so any one comment is a cause for celebration. A comment like this takes that celebration out of the range of "block party" and into "city-wide riot":
omg when i got this f*cking book from my professor who's a totally asshole i simply thought wtf
i've never ever read a title so stupid and tomorrow is my test so i'm dying fuckkkkk
btw DRUGS ARE MAINSTREAM omfg
adios biatchos
It was left on my review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a book which certainly could drive people to hardcore drugs, or, at the very least, 180-proof everclear. As I responded, I only wish I knew who it was that left this thing of beauty on my blog.
Hey guys, did you hear? Indie is dead! I don't usually follow HIPSTER RUNOFF, which is basically what it sounds like. It covers hipster music and "culture" (have we defined what hipster culture actually is yet?), usually in tiresome and off-putting ironic lolspeak and hyperbole. If hipsterism is, at least in part, trolling earnestness, i.e. desperately pretending not to care about something you really care about and doing everything in the name of irony, then HRO exists to troll hipsters by being hipster at hipsters. Have I lost you yet? Good. You just, like, don't get it, man. Appropriately, then, the site has heralded the end of indie, and the article was brought to my attention by Yeasayer's facebook page, with the caption "Someone telling it like it is -- how do we make a change?"
Here we are in the content farm era where Pitchfork, Rolling Stone,
SPIN, HIPSTER RUNOFF, Brooklyn Vegan, AbsoluteIndieMag.biz, Stereogum,
Buzzfeed Music, Shitty McBlogBlogMagazine.com/Music, GVB, FADER,
Complex, [other random ass blog/dumb website/magazine] all generally
post the same stuff. It’s just a matter of creating brand loyalty via
aesthetics and the perception of premium content to lemming ass internet
users.
Maybe just make something that people can share on Facebook to controversially discuss amongst their friends.
The demand for ‘innovative’ content has formed a buzz bubble.
Chillwave and sponsored-content-wave artists were the main beneficiary
of this bubble (post2k.5-2k11), but now, so many bands are getting a
taste of alleged buzz ‘before they are ready’/before it even means
anything in a legitimate context. The buzz machine is broken because
there is no trusted, fail proof mechanism to create pure buzz.
There is truth in this. Bigger emerging 'indie' artists don't stay 'indie' for very long anymore, and there is no discernible delineation between 'mainstream' press like Rolling Stone and 'hipster' press like Pitchfork or HRO. So you get bands that, by and large, should be indie bands, but they're suddenly already famous before they've even really done anything noteworthy. This article namedrops Lana Del Rey, Purity Ring, and Grimes as examples of this.
I’m not sure if I have unreasonable expectations. There just has to be a
new way that bands can ‘become bands’ other than ‘getting on the same
set of websites that will issue predictable opinions on them.’ Or maybe a
website can offer a new way of presenting bands without standardized
commentary. Perhaps ‘streaming services’ like Spotify and Pandora have
become those to some extent. Those appeal to the people who ‘just want
the music’ without needing to know the context.
I guess what all this means, really, that what is happening is an acceleration of the cycle that we already knew existed: sometimes indie bands outgrow indie and enter the mainstream. But HRO's argument, I guess, is that bands used to have to actually prove themselves before that happened, and it was a critical mass of fan-generated buzz that elevated them, not prematurely fawning articles from music publications desperate to discover the next big thing. So indie bands now are less about the music they produce and more about their capacity to generate interesting content for the press that covers them.
ALL THAT SAID. They haven't really convinced me that this is a thing that has broken indie beyond repair. Theorem:
Music speaks for itself
Taste is subjective
That is, if a band sucks, then we are in agreement: it sucks! And life goes on. Unless it doesn't actually suck that bad, and a lot of people end up liking it, even if the critics don't (which happens all the time. And life goes on.)
And here is kind of the main point. Purely as a consumer of music, I have very little motivation, outside of the impetus to maybe appear 'cool' or 'scene,' to double-check the credible indieness of whatever group I've just become interested in. Like, what does this even mean?:
Maybe the indie experiment only existed to create Grimes,
the ultimate internet content producer who makes content directly aimed
at internet viewers. She is the best example of ‘not being a
band/musician’, but instead a ‘playing by the rules’ content generation
machine that resonates with humans wasting time on the internet.
I'm not sure I even really care to understand. This is fun:
What I want from music is to like the sound, and (ideally, but not always) for it to speak to me personally in some way. The fact that the artist didn't burst out of a cocoon of spiritual enlightenment with this song on her self-actualized lips means nothing to me if it can still manage to evoke something in me. Sometimes artists write songs for themselves, and sometimes they write them for the people who are listening. Am I being manipulated because I like songs by someone who is "not a band/musician" but rather a "content generation machine"? I don't know, and I don't care. I've passed that point in my life where I need to measure the music I like by anyone's coolness barometer other than my own, thank god.
Ultimately, I'm not too concerned about this article. Like I said in the first paragraph, HRO is a meta hipster troll site, and though there has been a noticeable shift in the way that indie buzz is created and distributed, I am pretty sure life will go on, music will be made, and I'll find something to like. I kind of wonder why Yeasayer felt like they needed to signal boost the article, but trying to analyze the intentions of a band as frequently oblique as Yeasayer is a fruitless endeavor.
You know what I don't love? "Integrated" comments sections.
I don't mean this in a post-Civil Rights movement kind of way.
I mean it like this:
Yesterday we rolled out an upgraded commenting system, making it easy to
include your Facebook and Twitter friends in your comments. Our new
system allows for email notifications and you can see what your friends
are up to as well. Managing your account is now easier than ever through
My Voice Nation, where you can create your own personal profile for LA
Weekly by connecting with Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or Google.
That's from an email I got today from LA Weekly, a place I've commented probably once. But really -- what is all of this nonsense about needing to "include" my friends in my comments? I need my Facebook friends following me all over the internet about as much as I need another Facebook layout change.
I don't understand the necessity of my entire internet being integrated. I don't need my Facebook contacts involved in every little thing I do online. Do I drag my friends all over my real life with me? No! Do I tell my friends every time I have a comment to make to someone or something? No!
Services like this are usually opt-out, so I don't have to share everything, but the more and more that I see these services, the more and more I feel like the internet is moving in that direction, and I'm going to be pretty old school if I don't want to invite ~350 Facebook friends along for my daily road trip through the tubes.
So... it was building up to this: INTERNET, GET OFF MY LAWN!
Has anyone else ever noticed that internet arguments either extremely stupid or extremely pedantic? What I mean by this is that I rarely see any kind of argument that doesn't eventually end up with either people just trying to troll the shit out of each other, or people trying to prove the other one is AN UTTER MORON by pointing out some kind of logical fallacy or syntactic error.
So here is one type of argument:
And the other is something like this (though usually much, much longer, more pretentious, and more insufferable):
"You stated that people who get up early are more likely to like the colors orange and pink, since they are the colors of sunrise. Well, correlation does not equal causation.Where is your evidence?" "First of all, I never said that. You're misrepresenting my words and creating a straw man argument. My exact words were: most people I know who get up early like orange and pink because they remind them of the sunrise." "That's anecdotal evidence. That doesn't prove anything. Can you cite a study that backs up your claims? Until you can, I'm going to continue to assume you don't know what you're talking about." "You're completely incorrect; anecdotal evidence is absolutely admissible in many cases, not the least of which includes witness testimony in court. You're being deliberately obtuse. Are you always so stupid?" "AD HOMINEM!!!"
I found this fun thing over at my friend MS3's blog, which seems cool because I'm always looking for new stuff online! And because I think more people need to encounter my genius (duh.)
Anyway, let's see. At the moment, my life revolves mainly around my graduate program in genetics, but when I'm not at school, I actively pursue reading as much as I can (both online and novels,) drinking craft beer, exploring music, and catching up on TV shows I forgot to watch the first time (recently concluded: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) I also love eating food, but I'm not too great at cooking. I'm working on it though!
On my blog, you're likely to find book reviews, feminist musings, science-y rants, random reflections and introspections, and, if I'm lucky, the occasional laugh or too.
I recently had a spike in views on my responses to feminist critique post. It looks like I was linked on an Icelandic news site, which isn't the kind of meta-news a legit blog would be excited about, but since I'm just a baby blog I thought it was kind of cool. I have only the most vague idea of the context in which I was linked, since Google's Icelandic-to-English translator is, well, special.
Anyway, since speaking out about online harassment appears to be a hot topic here and elsewhere, I wanted to go ahead and share someone else doing the same. I have followed Anita's videos at Feminist Frequency for a long time, because I appreciate the depth of research she puts into her videos, and I also am generally interested in the topics she chooses to tackle. Recently, Anita requested funding on Kickstarter to complete a video series about sexism in video games. The post I've just linked includes over 100 stomach-turning, awful comments she received in response to her request. Some are much, much worse than others, in terms of violent sexism. Collectively, though, even the more mild ones contribute to an environment that just says "Shut up. Stop talking. How dare you talk about this. Fuck you for having an opinion."
If my summary seems hyperbolic, just please go look at her video. Notice her demeanor. Notice how calm and normal and smart and not angry and not man-hating she seems. Then, read as many of the comments as you can stomach, and imagine receiving those comments on every single thing you post online, and let me know if you still think that I'm exaggerating.
I'm really insecure about my future. So when the career center/marketing lady in a recent "What to do with your life" seminar said that building an online presence is actually becoming really important, even in science, I decided to take her seriously. I mean, I'm on the internet all the time anyway, so I may as well try to do something productive with it. Like, AHEM, a new layout for this blog? And the beer blog? I know they're not anything professional, but I put a little more time into them both than I had before, and I think they look nice enough.
Anyway, about the Tumblr. It's going to be kind of what Tumblr intends it to be, which is mainly narratives in photos, as opposed to here, which is a lot of word vomit, which if you're reading this you know already. But anyway, in the last few days of using the Tumblr, I've found a few more uses for it than I initially thought I would have. For example, I kind of want to show off the recipes I've been trying on Pinterest, but wasn't really interested in posting that here. Tumblr is perfect. I'll just post the link to the recipe, and the picture I took of the version I made, and boom.
Also, regarding grad school, I've been bouncing around this idea -- partly inspired by this blog -- of reintroducing civilized society to scientists. Even though geeky is en vogue right now, people still seem to have really bizarre impressions about the kinds of people who are scientists. So I wanted to focus on something that I find really interesting, which is music, and ask the people I work with: What do you listen to while you're working? And I started posting that kind of stuff on the Tumblr as well.
Anyway. I'm definitely buying into that whole "catch 'em all" idea of social media (except for Twitter. I just can't with that shit) but I'm going to do my best to make it interesting. And yes, I know that probably for a lot of people, what I cooked or what color my nails are doesn't constitute 'interesting', but maybe if you're reading this and you actually know me and you're tired of Charming Wholesomeness prolixity, you may find the Tumblr to be satisfying bite-sized snippets of what you know and love about me.
It's wholly unnecessary since I post short, context-free crap here too, but since some of the funniest things on the internet as of late are on Tumblr, I wanted to get one to re-blog all of that stuff and also maybe just post really frivolous pictures that haven't found a home here on this blog. So...
I made a new GIF. It's from the show Justified, featuring the delectable Timothy Olyphant. This GIF is not him, though; it's tough bitch Ava Crowder pimp-slapping someone with a frying pan.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In other words: you know what the first amendment does NOT cover? Your right to be an asshole on the internet. I love seeing the "free speech" argument pop up to defend someone who has said something offensive or asinine.
No, random internet moron, the first amendment does NOT mean that the owner of a private blog is obligated to post your opinion if s/he doesn't want to.
No, bearer of obtuse ideas, you shouldn't spout off bigoted shit just because you won't get arrested and prosecuted for doing so.
No, brave anonymous person, I can't imagine that your parents would be proud that you somehow managed to escape their lessons on decency and common sense.
No, fool who thinks your hegemonic ideas are somehow radical, I don't think I'll pay attention to your drivel any longer now that you've outed yourself as being both offensive and cliche (the two often do go hand in hand.)
Like many people, one of the things I've been using Pinterest for is to track recipes I find online. After collecting several, I felt it was high time to start actually trying to make the things I've been drooling over online. The tricky aspect at first was to choose a practical one. A lot of the recipes that are pinned are appetizers or desserts. I'm partial to the appetizers myself, but as someone cooking just for herself, I don't have the time or the money to cook tapas-style.
So for my first outing, I selected this one:
Braised Coconut Spinach & Chickpeas with Lemon (recipe here)
I didn't take a picture of my own version, but suffice it to say, it was successful (and actually pretty easy!) Outside of the prep work, all I had to do was just pour stuff in a pot and make sure I didn't burn it. This is a vegan dish, so to get a bit more mileage out of it leftovers-wise I cooked up some sausage on the side and had that with it. It was great. So, thanks Pinterest!
Oof. Okay, I picked this up recently to try to make amends for never having read it, despite it placing on so many “Best of SciFi” lists. Basic plot points first: the novel follows Case as he is hired for what is essentially a hacking-job in two worlds. His partner Molly operates in the physical realm, and Case’s talents lie in navigation of “cyberspace” — a virtual milieu that one must jack into. Throughout, Case struggles against the difficulty of the job, the anonymity and intrigue of his boss, and his own demons — namely, rampant drug use and the consequences of his outlaw status.
Cyberspace, a habitable, nearly tangible world is famously described in the novel as “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”
Neuromancer is often credited for being ahead of its time. Words like “cyberspace” did in fact enter our lexicon after being coined by Gibson in Neuromancer. There are also some themes explored here that have become increasingly relevant to us: cyber-security, un/reality, invasive and involuntary medicine and medical procedures, and socioeconomic class are all interwoven over the course of the narrative. In that way, I credit Neuromancer for being a thinker, and for indeed being rather visionary at the time it was published in 1984.
This is one of those little things that "women's interests" people tend to notice and get irked by, even if it isn't the biggest deal in the world. I signed up for Pinterest, and immediately after registering my username, it asked me to give them some of my (very general) interests so that it could suggest some people with those interests to follow. After selecting several categories, this is what I got (click on the image to view larger size):
Notice how all of the suggested people to follow, except in the "Hair and Beauty" and "Women's Apparel" categories -- obviously! --, are men. These people are probably selected, to some degree, at random, but this is a common enough occurrence that these things become a noticeable pattern moreso than a few isolated incidents. All together, when this kind of stuff happens as often as it does, it signals to women that there are "people interests" and "women's interests," and that "people interests" are best represented by men.
1) Where's the companion piece about equally stupid shit guys say?
2) Yet another thing created by guys that sets girls up to hate each other in order to look better to dudes -- "I'm a girl, I've never said most of those things because I'm not a vapid bitch like most girls"
Okay, here's something really quick, given my propensity to be ranting about something at any given time:
I see this a lot and it makes me squirm. I know that young progressives hate Fox News, but when you're trying to capture the intellectual upper ground, PLEASE don't go for the low-hanging fruit and call it "Faux News." For one thing, it's so old hat. For another thing, you guys do know how to pronounce "faux," right? It's just not a successful play on words if it requires you to willfully mispronounce the word to get the joke.
Was this blown out of proportion? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that she's inextricably linked to UCLA, and now the university feels the need to defend itself as a whole against the actions of, obviously, one individual. No, because even though UCLA's eating it right now, it's not like she's the only person at UCLA who feels the way she does. She was just the one who was stupid enough to put it on YouTube. People calling her a "bad apple" are really missing the point that there are still a lot of people out there that harbor racist feelings, which is bad, even if those feelings manifest themselves as cringey YouTube videos rather than, say, slavery. Maybe somewhere next to the shock and outrage people are expressing about "How someone could say such things!" they might also be examining themselves and learning why it's not only bad to say such things, but also to feel them, and possibly adjusting their own silent attitudes accordingly.
So... about all of this shock and awe. If there is one thing I know about white people, it's that among even the most socially-conscious of us, there are people who love to get away with telling a racist joke - that is, they're in comfortable enough company to know that their peers know they are just joking, and they're not really racist. But let's think about this a bit. It is exactly that kind of permissive environment that allows people like Wallace to post videos like that and think that it's just a little bit of humor. She lacked the sense to realize that The Internet ≠ Your Private Circle of Friends, but I think more of us with a certain racial privilege (read: white people) should be willing to, in said Private Circle of Friends, be like "Hey man, that's not cool. If you don't really believe that stuff, maybe you shouldn't say it. And if you do believe it, then you should probably accept that you're being a little bit racist and try to work on that."
Asians are kinda bearing the brunt of overt racism right now. There is this idea that Asian Americans are a "model minority" because they don't contribute significantly to the crime or detention rate, and because they are often highly educated and perceived as being very hard working. Most educated white people know have a little bit of liberal guilt at this point about racism toward blacks and Hispanics, and we know better than to say nasty shit about them publicly. This veil of public anti-racism doesn't always extend to Asians because there isn't necessarily a repeated history of the white man holding Asians down, in this country or others. So it seems a little more okay, for some reason, to employ racist humor against Asians. The more you think about this, the less sense it makes.
Finally, in regards to the "feedback" Wallace has received. I'm very interested in the responses to the video, and in the responses to those responses. (It all gets very meta.) There are the "appropriate" responses, which address the content of the video. The "inappropriate" responses, in my mind, are the ones that address her rather than the content of the video. These responses include the death threats and the "ur a slut" and the "typical blonde bimbo." Neither of these epithets may be as damaging as, say, racial discrimination, but they do succeed in bringing the focus away from what she did, which we know for certain and we can discuss with certainty, and directing it toward who she is, which the majority of us don't know and can't talk about with any authority at all. That weakens our position. Doing your hair and makeup and wearing a low-cut top may mean you want to look nice (to someone's standards) in your video, but it doesn't under any circumstances automatically mean she's a whore. Interestingly, even amongst feminist circles, there seems to be little condemnation of the "who she is" conversation, and even some suggestions of happiness and satisfaction that she is receiving death threats. I mean look, I have no sympathy for this girl, but let's be clear about one thing - violence, and threats of violence, are never okay. Furthermore, I can't exactly understand the anger toward people who are calling out some of the more unsavory feedback. There was an interesting article on Feministing, back when Chris Brown beat up Rhianna, that though what he did was absolutely inexcusable, it's worth examining how his race might be flavoring the particular nature of the discussion around the incident. There was a lot of anger about that article, a sense of "Why are we making this about race when we should be talking about gender?" -- or more specifically: "Race isn't what matters here - it's that a man beat up a woman." In their personal relationship, no, race did not matter. But in the larger societal context, it is obvious to any who pay attention that black men get, on average, a whole lot more flack for their crimes in the media than white men get for their equivalent crimes. So the consensus was, at the end of that discussion, that acknowledging that Brown might be in for a larger world of shit than a white guy in a similar situation isn't the same as giving him a pass for it; likewise, acknowledging that a lot of the specific commentary directed at Wallace has to do with her being a busty blonde lady isn't the same as being sympathetic toward her. That's why I steadfastly disagree with the "Why are you making this about gender when it's really about race" people. As a society with limitless access to the tomfoolery of individuals and the ability to comment (often anonymously) to our heart's content on those things, we should be aware of how our contributions to the discussion shape the discussion. In this case, a sexist contribution, even against someone who has done a repugnant thing, is detrimental and moves the discussion backwards. Fighting one -ism with another doesn't work toward anyone's equality.
"More women than men discuss sexism, and it is not because we find the topic more fun, entertaining, or enjoyable than men.[sic] It is because sexism gets in the way of our freedom. I blog about sexism in geek culture not because it’s my passion, but because it gets in the way of my passions. My struggle against my marginalization is not my hobby."
