Time with Friends; that's a Good Thing

I'm really glad I drove down to visit Posicat yesterday; I haven't seen enough of him. Watching How to Train Your Dragon 2 on his 3D televsion was a novel experience. The last movie I saw in 3D, I think, was Captain Eo at Disneyworld when I was in elementary school.

We went out for food, too. He suggested Sweet Tomatoes, since there was soup I could eat. That turned out to be a great idea. I was down four pounds over the last few days due to not eating anything but pudding and yogurt. I had six bowls of soup, a big bowl of ice cream, chocolate milk, and a milkshake. Eating actual food felt *so* good. I was up five pounds over yesterday when I checked this morning.

Yeah, I still can't eat solid food very easily. It scrapes against the burned spot and hurts. A lot. But less then earlier. I didn't go to the campus clinic yesterday because it seemed better, but the progress is really slow. I have a neurology appointment tomorrow; I'll drop by my primary care doctor's office while I'm there and ask the staff what they think.

I'm way behind on day-to-day stuff. I'm still glad I spent yesterday with Posi instead of doing laundry or what-have-you. But today is a long day at school, with my evening gym class. I think I'll pick up my gym clothes at home after my afternoon class, then drop by Todd and Serin's place to check in on it. I'll read for an hour there, go to Yoga and Pilates, then get home for an early night. My medical appointment tomorrow is at 8 o' clock in the morning. *sighs*

There are workers outside the door to the archives. They are using loud machines to cut pipes, and playing loud music on a boombox. I don't begrudge them either; it's just kind of hard to concentrate on anything.

Burned Mouth

Ok, now I'm more worried about my mouth. I'm feeling a little pain way back in one nostril when I breath in, in the same general area as the mouth pain.

Once the archives staff get back, I'm going to ask them to get away for a while and visit the clinic.

Politics and Evolution

I've written previously on Facebook about my problems with evolution skepticism. In response to a piece of news about the governor of my state refusing to answer a question about whether he believes in evolution (http://www.nationaljournal.com/twenty-sixteen/walker-weasels-on-evolution-20150212), I'm going to share that writing with you here. I find myself getting more annoyed these days at anti-science, anti-intellectual discourse. That's part of the problem, not part of the solution. And it really is an attack, directly or indirectly, on my chosen career path at this point.

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First, as an anthropologist (or at least as someone whose undergraduate degree will be in anthropology), and as someone who knows working anthropologists, the suggestion that evolution is wrong, or not scientifically supported, invalidates a significant portion of our discipline. It suggests that a great deal of what we know about pre-modern humans (which in this context means not modernity as in technology, but modernity as in pre homo sapiens sapiens) is wrong. Not only that, but it suggests that anthropologists are either too dumb to realize that their evidence is not as strong as they think it is, or that they are all engaged in a great cover up. Both of those possibilites are upsetting to a lot of anthropologists.

Second, and again as someone who is working toward being a social scientist and who knows working social scientists, I feel like skepticism about evolution casts doubt on the nature of scientific inquiry itself. The process of scientific investigation is, at its core, the same, whether we're talking about physics, biology, chemistry, or what-have-you. The same kind of experimentation and refutation happens with all new theories within scientific disciplines. This is what makes them scientific. To suggest that this has somehow failed in evolution suggests either that the process of scientific advancement is fundamentally flawed, or that the biologists who have worked out the theory of evolution have engaged in defective work. Defective work that no one else has ever managed to show serious problems with.

It is true, of course, that sometimes rejection of major theories is slow and mired in politics. Politics has slowed advancement of the sciences for centuries, keeping ideas from the heliocentric solar system to ethnic equality (anthropologists have a lot of blame in that area!), to quantum physics. Yet, in the end, sooner or later, those bad ideas are proven wrong.

It's possible that some other explanation in keeping with our understanding of the physical laws of the universe will be found that replaces evolution, just as the same could happen with gravity. An example of an alternate theory for gravity I rather like is that what's really happening is that every individual thing in the universe is expanding at a constant rate, a process which keeps things smushed into each other. It's cute. If you finagle it enough, maybe it even accounts for most of the phenomena we associate with gravity. It also doesn't fit Occam's Razor. Just like epicycles, and epi-epi-cycles in the orbits of a geocentric solar system, you can make it work, but you really have to stretch your brain.

It's also possible, of course, that a creator formed the universe anywhere from a few thousand years ago to yesterday afternoon, just as we see it now. If that's the case, then it really doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fact that science continues to provide the best way we have of understanding why the physical world *as it is now* behaves the way it does.

The scientific method of inquiry has provided us with satellites, remote surgery, lasers, computers, and so much more. If we question the validity of the process that created the concept of evolution, why not question the validity of the processes behind the internal combustion engine or powered flight? It's all based on the same idea; that we can observe our surroundings, come up with explanations for them, attack those explanations in every conceivable way as part of a knock-down drag-out fight to disprove them, and finally take the ones the survived and use them to make fruitful predictions about reality.
That, in my humble opinion, is the way it is.

Polyamory in the Popular Discourse

This is cool stuff, but I wish so many visual depictions (such as the one used for this article) of the abstract concept of 'polyamory' and consensual non-monogamy weren't so lacking in people of color, so heteronormative, nor so prone to showing multiple women with one man.
Baby steps....

"Live Science: "Polyamory Stigma Lessens with Familiarity""
http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/2015/02/live-science-polyamory-stigma-lessens.html

(Clearly, I'm not doing very well at concentrating on work today. They're still cutting pipes *right* outside the archive doors. I keep losing my place in HTML I'm editing....)

Fifty Shades of Gray

In response to criticism of the Fifty Shades of Gray movie being passed around on Facebook.

So, here's the thing with this movie, and this book, and whatever else it is. (In the interest of full discosure, I have not read it.)

(Warning; I'm going to talk about BDSM, kink, consent, rape, and things like that here.)

This is a fantasy, right?

In BDSM/kink culture (which I'm only peripherally involved in, though I know many folks who are more a part of it than I), consent is paramount. Nothing should ever be done without full, informed, and conscious consent of any people involved in an activity. I think this is common-sense. Without consent, BDSM is assault and/or rape.

However, once consent is given, any number of things can happen that take the form of non-consent. People even talk about "consensual non-consent", wherein people engage in 'scenes' without a safeword, or re-create scenes of kidnap or rape. And as long as those things are negotiated beforehand, and all parties have consented to what will play out, that's ok. That is informed consent.

Now, people who are into those things may well fantasize about being subjected to this kind of thing non-consenually. That's perfectly ok. The realm of internal thought and desire is a private place and should not be subject to public scrutiny. It is when it is translated into action that affects other people that it becomes subject to certain regulation to ensure safety and happiness for those involved.

These books, this movie, is a fantasy. It sounds like one that I would personally find pretty disturbing and unenjoyable, to be fair. But my standards are not universal, and there are a lot more writings, videos, and photographs out there that are equally disturbing, or more so. By these standards, Fifty Shades is nothing special, nor even problematic. Again, fantasy is fantasy. I think that any fantasy of this kind that, for whatever reason, became such a huge pop-culture phenomenon would be subjected to the same kind of criticism. And, thus, there are many, many more that are not, and that people within the BDSM / kink community encounter every day and have no problem with.

I guess I just want to say that, when we talk about this movie, let's make sure we talk, seriously and deeply, about why it's problematic, rather than just saying "that's not what BDSM is like." There are plenty of people who know that's not what BDSM is like in reality who have fantasies that are just as full of non-consent as Fifty Shades is. In certain, very tightly controlled ways, this is what *aspects* of BDSM *can* be like. That needs to be explained, not hidden from people who would benefit from a fuller understanding of the issues involved.

What do you think?

Dating Sims at the Humble Bundle

My dad pointed me at the current Humble Indie Bundle of the week. It's dating sims! *bounces* I've looked for dating sims on my phone, but almost all of what I find is unplayably poor translations of Japanese games. Here, I can pick up six for less than $6.

One of them is a cute game called Roommates, which is a college slice-of-life sim that I've already played through the free version of on my phone. It was one of the few good ones, so I think it's worth the price by itself. I don't know the other ones, but they look interesting at the least.

And I'm going to give them $10 to get Hatoful Boyfriend as well. If you haven't heard of Hatoful Boyfriend, it's one of those wonderfully bizarre things that could only come from Japan. You are a human girl who lives in a world where most of the human population was wiped out by a terrible disease that also mutated birds into human-sized, intelligent creatures. You are attending an avian high school. And as noted, this is a dating sim.Yes. I read through a play-through with screenshots a year or two ago and it was *way* too funny not to spring for.

(But I'm not going to pay the $35 to get a pillowcase with one of the Hatoful Boyfriend characters on it....)

https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly

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Here's that playthrough I mentioned. This is *hilarious*. The author begins, " I have a horrible cold and I am miserable so naturally I am dating pigeons."

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php...