Flight Papers

The U.N. Security Council has unanimously declared that rape is a weapon of war. My first thought upon hearing this was “yay!” My second thought was that perhaps “yay” is not the right response to anything pertaining to rape; in any event, thinking about the news even now stirs a dull pang of hope.

Reiterating deep concern that, despite its repeated condemnation of violence against women and children in situations of armed conflict, including sexual violence in situations of armed conflict, and despite its calls addressed to all parties to armed conflict for the cessation of such acts with immediate effect, such acts continue to occur, and in some situations have become systematic and widespread, reaching appalling levels of brutality,—United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820

This shouldn’t be shocking or mind-blowing. Perhaps my response is a result of setting the bar so low that even the shoddiest expression of respect for women’s autonomy can’t help but trip over it. But it is shocking. Mind-blowing. All in the most fantastic way. The articles read ever-so-slightly like dispatches from an alternate universe, one where the UNSC is a powerful force for improving human rights, where rape is non-controversially regarded as systemic, institutionalized, and oppressive, where the U.S. Secretary of State, a black woman, says things like, “We cannot forget as we examine this issue other women activists who struggle for freedom under violent environments,” and “As an international community we have a special responsibility to punish perpetrators of sexual violence who are representatives of international organisations.”

International organisations. Like, for example, the U.N.

Or the U.S. military.

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You worked to realize an exceptional dream.

…Name the dream.

Your work violated the order.

…Name your crime.

The violation threatened powerful people or things.

…Name what and who you threatened.

You were punished for your crimes.

…Name the punishment.

Your dream was not destroyed, but changed.

…Say what you lost.

You work to realize an exceptional nightmare.

…Name the nightmare.

Through these trials, you have found:

A Heart, to tell the clean from the damned,

Your Heart is rooted in nightmare. Say what it is.

Claws, to ensnare the unworthy,

Your Claws take something that cannot be returned, or offer something that cannot be repaid. Name the thing.

Tongues to speak their true shapes,

Your Tongues grew in your punishment. Name the lie that they cannot say.

A Maw, to consume them.

Your Maw is lined with sharp teeth. Name the power you hold over those lesser than you.

Your name is not for you to decide. The others will name you.

Next up: the city.

I did not choose to turn this blog into a collection of not-well-selected links to—unsurprisingly—airlines.

You may (or may not) have noticed some DNS hiccups here. Specifically, I let the registration almost lapse. The issues are resolved, I think, and I’m set up for automatic re-registration, so it shouldn’t happen again. Hopefully.

That brief brush with pain made me think about how totally fucked ICANN’s whole DNS registration policy is right now. There’s a loophole in their policies which lets anyone register a domain name and return it within three days or less for a full refund. The idea seems to have been that most people wouldn’t want to continually return and re-register a domain they actually wanted to keep, and that no registrar would be willing to put up with the paperwork anyway.

Except, of course, there are thousands of registrars, and some of them are assholes.

So what happens is, when a domain registration lapses, some registrar will lap it up as soon as possible, and plaster it with ads. (They’ll do this for all the other top level domains of an already-registered domain, too.) And then, just before the tasting period is up, they’ll drop the registration, and if there have been any hits—or sometimes if there haven’t—they’ll re-register the domain.

They can keep doing this forever.

What this means is: if your registration lapses into the public pool for even a day, you’re screwed. One of these registrars will grab it and squat on it with ads forever. You can buy it back from them, of course, for hundreds of times the going rate. Or, you can get a new domain name, and try to get the word out that your old one has become a cesspool of penis enlargement scams.

(ICANN could fix this, of course, just by dropping the tasting period, and possibly by making lapsed domain names more expensive for anyone who isn’t the original registrar to grab. If it costs even the nominal registration fee of $5 to “taste” a domain, speculation isn’t worth it anymore. ICANN, of course, is not exactly known for their responsiveness to community concerns, let alone those that don’t impact large corporations terribly much. Who knows if this will ever get addressed.)

Is Lost’s Island Electromagnetic Enough to Move Itself Through Space? Time-Travel Expert Says It’s Not Impossible.

Well, thank goodness. I was wondering about the plausibility of moving an island through an artificially-created wormhole, but if an expert—especially an expert in that vaunted and well-founded field of time travel—thinks it’s possible, then I am TOTALLY ON BOARD.

I’ve been slumping into illness, hence posts being a bit sporadic of late. The blitzkrieg seems to be working, however, so I should be on my posting feet again soon.

Sarah J over at Season of the bitch gave Flight Papers an E.

This is a compliment! Not a snide comment that I need to say “fuck” more and talk about sex—though perhaps I should.

Part of the award is passing it on. This has made me realize that I am a slaaacker when it comes to reading blogs, but here are some fucking awesome women (and one cool dude) anyway:

Taking Steps

is just beautiful. (Also, she’s collecting monies to go to the Allied Media Conference this year. Go help, if you can.)

Brownfemipower,

who does not write theory so much as practice, and who I’m really happy to see again.

Echidne of the Snakes,

who might get this based on her blog’s title alone, but she’s also, like, brilliant.

Fair Game

is a running collection of Emily Care and Meguey Baker’s shiny play experiences and insights into games.

Girls Read Comics (and they’re pissed)

is soothing for the comics geek buried deep, deep down inside me.

Thouandone

is basically Jonathan Walton’s design process put on the Internet, which makes it cool.

Read them all. Right. Now.

I saw Nightwish a bit earlier. Opening for them was a band called Sonic Syndicate, who I think really demonstrated admirable restraint in not calling themselves Sønïc Sinndikæt. At one point, the lead singer said something that led to the following exchange:

“Did he just say this song is about…”
“…gay rights”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Neat!”

Death metal being what it is, I had no way of knowing if the song was in fact about gay rights, but I bopped my head along agreeably all the same.

Nightwish made me really want to see a big, steampunk-anachronistic blockbuster about Anne Bonny and Mary Raed.

I’ve been loathe to write about the primaries in the U.S., mostly because I try to only write about those things where I feel like I have something to contribute, and I haven’t experienced any particular election-related insights.

(Also: I don’t have or want a side apart from “not another douchebag, please, the increased relevance of political songs is not worth it,” but it’s almost impossible to write anything without being shuttled into one camp or another. Hell, I went to the county Democratic county caucus not voting in the presidential primaries (I did the math. My vote wouldn’t have mattered either way, in our precinct.))

That said, here’s something a friend said a while back, the truth of which just struck me: Race and gender are, for me, the only interesting issues in this election.

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Saw Prince Caspian a couple of days ago. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great, it mostly failed to make an impression on me at all beyond wondering who these people are, and why there is a movie about them. More vodka was clearly necessary.

Oh, and there were bits that irked the hell out of me, which I shall assume were just replacements for scenes that would not have irked the hell out of me. Like these, and all apologies to Maia, who does this better.

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Renegade Evolution (who is brill) has a rather lovely takedown of a particular poster’s, um, “arguments” against supporting sex workers. Not the porn industry, not porn itself, but sex workers.

Think on that for a second.

Now, look, I don’t want to become all “no true Scotsman”-ey. I know that there are problems with an industry that men construct to serve male pleasure. I know that there are feminist issues with working in such an industry. I know that an enormous amount of porn is explicitly degrading to women, and in fact, if someone says, “porn is degrading to women,” I am not inclined to disagree.

But when someone says, “You don’t support sex workers,” and your response is, “Well, we also don’t support drug dealers, bank robbery, embezzlement, arson, murder and a host of other things even tho women do them. Oh! How rude of feminists not to support all the choices of women!” then you Do. Not. Get. It.

You are not a true feminist, and I am revoking your card, and it was Andrea Dworkin who died and put me in charge.

You can critique the sex industry. You can critique sex work. I will even allow that you can critique the decision to go into sex work, but I would not do it, because you do not know all of the everything it is to be her, and unless you are willing to wrest agency out of her hands, I would suggest you not imply that she is acting the role of a puppet, rather than a person.

The thing you absolutely cannot, cannot do is say that sex workers are not women who deserve fair pay, worker’s compensation, and all the other rights afforded to people doing what is, in fact, relatively taxing, dangerous work. You especially cannot do this by making an appeal to the bloody criminal justice system, which is not precisely a floating orb of social justice, vacuum-insulated from the patriarchy that birthed it.

I don’t want national borders to exist, but that doesn’t mean I ought to say, “Immigrant women? Fuck ‘em. They broke the law, don’tcha know?”. I don’t want race to exist, but that doesn’t mean I get a free pass to ignore the particular issues faced by women who are not of mine. I don’t want capitalism to exist, but that doesn’t make the gendered effects of poverty somehow not a feminist issue.

You don’t want the for-men-controlled-by-men sex industry to exist but that does not give you the ability to, as a “feminist,” shit on women doing sex work. It does not give you the ability to erase their agency. It does not give you the ability to erase their rights. It does not give you the ability to erase them.

Seriously.

Fuck.

So, my computer is still a bit wonky, mostly because I haven’t had a few moments to put it right. Regardless, I at one point found myself in X, basically sans a window manager (I’m using twm right now, because nothing else is properly installed. Yeah.) And because the normal startup stuff isn’t running, control and caps lock aren’t swapped.

This aggravates the hell out of me.

Most normal people, they basically take the keyboard layout they can get. Me? Some time ago, I saw Jamie’s whole control and caps lock need to be swapped thing, took it to heart, and now I can barely type on a keyboard with the normal mapping. If I’m doing any kind of text editing, forget about it.

So! Once again, without the benefit of nice graphical tools, I’m left thinking, “how do you do this?”

Only this time, I kinda know the answer: xmodmap lets you change the keyboard mapping. So I fucked around with that for a bit, and in the man page it actually has a, “here’s how you swap control and caps lock,” bit, and I did it, and that was fine.

Only it turns out that in my fucking around, I managed to remap the letter ‘v’ to… nothing. I think I tried using some recipe for a Solaris keyboard, or something. Regardless, I found myself unable to type the letter v.

So I can just use xmodmap to fix it, right? Just run xmodmap -e ‘keycode 55 = v’, and you’re all set.

Only, how do you input that command if you can’t type the letter v?

Simple. You go into Firefox (no vs there), go to some blog post, copy the letter v out and paste it in.

And lo, I can type ‘v’, and my keyboard is how I like it.

Like a ninja, I’m telling you.