Men are adopting the feminist behaviors polite society increasingly demands of them. But the core of chauvanism remains. Less able to dominate their wives, friends, family and co-workers, they turn to exploiting sex workers through porn, strip clubs and prostitution. Things improve for women at the top, while women at the bottom shoulder an even greater proportion of abuse.
Monthly Archive for October, 2009
At some point I started hanging out with younger people… 26 year olds, 25, 24, 22, 21…
Either I think the folks I know my own age are leaving something important behind, or I left something behind and I’m trying to get it.
I’m not sure which.
Things that are good to do, periodically, and which I forget to do sometimes when I am feeling fiendy:
- Shower
- Run errands
- Stretch and dance
- Go for a walk
- Take deep breaths
* * *
Recently I noticed that I actually enjoy binge eating until my stomach feels stuffed and stretched out. We are almost always holding some kind of tension in our body. Maybe we lifted a bunch of boxes yesterday, and now we have an inclination to hunch over. Maybe we slept all bunched up, and we have an inclination to spread out.
I think for me, as someone who worries about being fat, or awkward, I often try to scrunch up my stomach… to squeeze it so instead of being a little ball that hangs out, it is a smooshed pancake along my midsection.
Now the trouble is, my stomach has two sets of muscles… the ones that constrict on the inside, that pull it in, and the ones on the outside that can pull out and stretch my stomach out, in conjection with the inside ones relaxing.
Subconsciously I constrict a lot, for the reasons mentioned above, which means A) those muscles get tired, and B) the outside muscles get antsy, and want to be stretched out. But because I so stubbornly want to fight to have a flat stomach, I won’t let either set of muscles do what they want.
Ironically, there is one activity that will force my inner constricting muscles to relax, and encourage the outer ones to pull and stretch my stomach bigger: binge eating. After I binge eat, I am FORCED to stretch out those muscles the way they want to, in opposition to the way they are normally forced to be by me. But then this makes me feel worse, which increases the constricting the following day, propagating a really terrible cycle.
What is interesting about this is that it points out a prescription for binge eating: Stretch. If you really relax your stomach, let those clenching muscles release, and encourage your stretching muscles to stretch out big and long… you will satisfy your body’s craving WITHOUT having to eat a ton.
I wonder if this is common with other addictions. Do sex addicts just need to open up their pelvises, or clench their cores? Do smokers need to stand up and take deep breaths? Do sleep addicts need to hug and rub against soft things?
I don’t know. But all of these things are free, and they seem like they’d be worth a shot.
* * *
These are all part of a general plan to overcome feelings of depression by changing the habits of my life, realizing that you can’t hide from the emotions. I would encourage people with addictions to act them out at times when you’re feeling strong. Walk to the liquor store but DON’T buy the cigarettes. Call your friend when you’re not horny, just to talk, not to ask for sex.
Do these things as a kind of psychological training, so that the next time you are heading down the path to your addiction, you have some memories of those places that involve something other than giving in. If the path to your addiction is full of places that remind you of giving in to your compulsions, what option do you really have?
So, practice your escape routes when you’re feeling sober… act out your compulsions when you’re feeling fiendy… really act them out physically.
And the list of things… they are just things that seem to make me feel better, more together. I guess because they are things I rarely do unless I’m feeling good, doing them reminds me of feeling good, and subsequently makes me feel good.
Kind of like how acting goofy makes you feel high because getting high makes you act goofy.
Generally, the people who are building web software platforms are focused on crazy stuff. They want to enable applications that are more powerful (think Google Maps), that work on more devices (think Facebook on the iPhone), that are more media rich (thing YouTube), and that work in crazier network environments (thing Google Reader’s offline mode).
That’s all well and good, but I think there’s a huge problem with web development platforms that’s getting ignored: accessibility.
Now, I don’t mean accessibility in terms of “my eyesight is going, and I can’t read this web page”, I mean accessibility in terms of “Bill Gates can build a web application, can you?”
There are three big barriers to this:
- It’s hard to learn how to write code
- It’s hard to actually deploy code on the web
- It’s hard to get access to the code that matters to us
Let’s take these in turn:
It’s hard to write code
This is true. It is hard. A bunch of things are making it easier, though: new technologies, like PHP, garbage collection, web frameworks like rails and django, and a general proliferation of awesome libraries (imagemagick) and APIs (google maps) that make doing cool stuff easy.
Despite progress, I think there’s a lot to be done here. I think far in the future we’ll start seeing more innovative ways of making applications that start looking more human and natural. Yahoo Pipes is a step in this direction, but that kind of thing is way off.
That said, for the near future, the easiest way to code is going to be in a forgiving programming language, in a forgiving environment, with some good well-designed libraries to build on.
It’s hard to actually deploy code on the web
This is historically been a huge problem. One of the main differences between running code on your computer and running code on the web is that web servers cost money. I mean, computers cost money too, but it’s a cost many of us have already paid. A maybe even bigger problem is that it’s a huge pain in the ass to get your code on a server. Heck, I think its hard, and I’ve been doing this for years.
Thankfully, a major new innovation is making this a lot easier. Application hosting providers like Heroku and Google AppEngine that work on top of on-demand “computing clouds” have gotten the process down to a few commands. And excitingly, these services are free for small apps, so you can write something and put it out there for a few friends, instantly. You won’t get charged until you start promoting it for the whole web to use.
So it’s gotten relatively easy to put code up, but this brings us to the next problem…
It’s hard to get access to the code that matters to us
I use Gmail every day, but the source code isn’t available. I use WordPress and Wikipedia all the time too, and the code for those is available, but neither of them can be deployed on Heroku or AppEngine, so it doesn’t really matter that I have access to the code–I can’t use it.
This, in general, is a problem. Too much of the code I rely on is unavailable. But the truth is, there is more and more open source code out there, it’s just not always that easy for me to use. There’s a great open source search engine called Lucene, but it’s not deployed anywhere that I can actually use it. And it’s certainly not deployed in such a way that I can edit the source code and be using my changes in minutes.
And this is the real problem with accessibility
There’s no glue
We have all of these great open source technologies out there, but they’re not integrated together in such a way that I can be using an app one minute, the next minute be editing its code, and the minute after be using my updated code.
I think the world is ripe for a project that makes this it’s central focus.
Here’s how I would structure the goals:
- Ease of deployment. You should be able to point your browser at some web page, type some code, click deploy, and have an app running somewhere.
- Support the social. If I write a little email client, you should be able to create your own copy, change the code, and be running your new version just as easily as I created the first one. And I should be able to be aware of your changes, and integrate them back into my branch.
- Users own their data. Instead of having each application keep it’s data to itself, store the data somewhere that the users can control. This allows developers to create lots of different versions of apps that can all access your data, and the users don’t have to worry about importing and exporting for each one. It means someone can write a new version of Wikipedia that interacts with the actual wikipedia pages, instead of some weird copies.
And that’s it actually. Make it easy, make it social, and keep the apps separated from the data.
It seems simple, but I’ve been trying to figure this out for years and I’m still not there yet.
Manifesto
I want to stop consuming all this crap that’s swirling around in culture. Culture will kill you. It will destroy your soul. Not because it’s rock and roll or gangsta rap or video games, but because it’s 99% pandering. You let yourself get pandered to and you stop being a person, and you start becoming an audience. A target audience.
I want to make things I care about. I want to say things that are important to me. I want to dream up experiences that matter to me, and go and make them happen.
And I am happy for people to be join in. And I will be delighted to sit and enjoy the beautiful shit they come up with… the things that are important to them, that they made, that they dreamt.
But I’m done with this “media” shit.
I want to stop consuming all this crap that’s swirling around in culture. Culture will kill you. It will destroy your soul. Not because it’s rock and roll or gangsta rap or video games, but because it’s 99% pandering. You let yourself get pandered to and you stop being a person, and you start becoming an audience. A target audience.
I want to make things I care about. I want to say things that are important to me. I want to dream up experiences that matter to me, and go and make them happen.
And I am happy for people to be join in. And I will be delighted to sit and enjoy the beautiful shit they come up with… the things that are important to them, that they made, that they dreamt.
But I’m done with this “media” shit.
So, I’m working on a new site called Gathrr.com. It’s a different kind of RSS aggregator that lets you set up public sites with groups of your favorite feeds. It’s not quite ready for prime time, but they say you’re supposed to launch when you have one useful feature, and it has one! So I’m launching it! Yay!
I made a couple of example sites: planetinformatics.gathrr.com aggregates the blogs of all my lovely former Indiana University colleages, and erik.gathrr.com aggregates all of my personal web stuff… this blog, my twitter, my flickr, my development blog, and my del.icio.us links.
Anyway, it will surely break, but any intrepid souls out there who know of some groups of blogs that were just MEANT to go together on one page, give it a try and let me know how it goes.
Seriously, There Will Be Bugs, so don’t get your expectations up too high. But do please try it and comment.
Things it does:
- Aggregate a list of feeds on one page
- Update the feeds every hour
Things which are planned, but don’t work yet:
- Add/remove/edit the feeds after you enter them
- Respond gracefully when feeds don’t work
- Let you customize the appearance of your gathrring
- Let other people suggest feeds
- Provide RSS uber-feeds for gathrrings
- Auto-discover feeds based on urls you put in
- Interact with the twitter rate limits gracefully (you can only hit 150 twitter feeds an hour, so twitter feeds in gathrrings won’t be updated very often for now)
- Use push APIs for popular sites to improve performance and real-timeness
Feel free to let me know if these or other features seem extra important to you!