Chaos Theory

Why it’s time to stop the anti-spoiler paranoia

"When Charles Dickens was giving away major plot points in his chapter titles, it wasn’t because he was a dick; it was because his readers knew that the real fun was in reading his prose, in absorbing and enjoying his words. Anti-spoiler zealots largely ignore craft, privileging plot above all else. But the plot is often the least interesting thing about a movie, TV show, or book."

 

Holy shit, this story

The tale of the superhero with cancer.

 

5 times when you shouldn't approach women

Please pay attention to this.

 

On the dynamics of swearing

Interesting discussion of who's "allowed" to swear and who isn't. Of course it's all about power:

"But it was pretty obvious that status and power were involved. The boss could fire you. The customers could complain and cause you to be fired. If they, themselves, dropped a few profanities as they ate their blueberry waffles, their server might be offended, but could not express it. She might, if there was a spare second, frown and mutter disapproval back in the kitchen, but there would be no real consequences for a customer dropping a few curse words in her hearing. These rules remained the same for every food service job I took. Looking around, it became pretty clear that power and status were a pretty good determiner of who you could or couldn’t swear in front of. And that while I didn’t care if some customer swore incidentally while I was taking away their syrup-covered plates, some of my co-workers took it as disrespectful, but had no power to protest."

And then there's the time when she works on a land surveying crew with a bunch of dudes and one guy is all:

"After the meeting, in the few moments before everyone left, there was some polite, outwardly jovial chatting about the frustrations of the project and Mr I Don’t Have Those Numbers Yet mentioned something that hadn’t gone right and then turned to me, with a smirk, and said, “But I won’t say what I thought, because there’s a lady present!”

This was the first time I had ever seen the supposed respect of not swearing in front of someone turned into a means to put someone in their place. All right, I had shown him up over the cut sheet, but I wasn’t one of the guys and don’t forget it.

No, he wanted to draw my attention to the fact that he would have spoken more frankly, and it was only my presence that restrained him. The “joke” also invited the others present to appreciate my outsider status, and ratify it by laughing because yes, of course, we’d be swearing if she wasn’t here."

Someone's got another take on it in the comments:

"I have a candidate for grand theory of swearing. Thinking on it, I think swears are rhetorical weapons: the rules for having and employing them are pretty much like those Western society once had for swords. Upper classes get to have swords, wear them as decoration, and even toy with them (tournaments). The peasant class may get access to swords as infantry fighting for their masters, but only the men, and only on the job — you certainly don’t get to wear them around town — but of course, having access to them, they use them on one another (but not if their bosses can see).

There’s a difference between swearing at someone and swearing around someone, and it’s interesting to me that a lot of the blue-collar background people I’ve discussed swearing with don’t really see a distinction. My observation of the rules of my class is that that’s a huge distinction, the distinction between exclaiming “Ah! Fuck!” when you swat a fly on your hand with a machete, and saying “Fuck you and your fax machine” to a coworker who showed you up in public — the distinction between getting to wear a scabbarded sword on your hip and actually drawing it on somebody."

So that exists

All female, minibike, dance troupe.

 

"how can you imagine a whole future and not imagine women in it?"

There is some debate on the Internet over whether a certain book is really crappy or not, and whether or not it is okay to be a famous author who reviews the book and doesn't like it at all. (I say yes, that's fine to say you hated it. I've read far meaner reviews.) Also, a lot of people are creeped out that the lone female character is basically a sexbot. And what the author had to say about that.... was even ickier.

Kinda sounds like the same old shit to me. I like the review at Book Smugglers myself:

"At one point when reading Barricade it struck me how there were only but a few women present in this narrative. The three main characters (two men, one woman) travel around Britain for weeks and they meet dozens of people and barely any of those are female. This world seems to be populated mostly by “he” (soldiers, survivors, fighters, scientists, workers, heroes and anti-heroes ) with the occasional “she” (pleasure “bots”, incompetent supervisors, victims, a kindly old woman, a dead wife and one rapist) thrown in for good measure.

Where are all the women in this world, I asked myself, how can you imagine a whole future and not imagine women in it?"

 

Once a Month, Photographers Gather at a Denny's Parking Lot to Capture the Full Moon

'This Denny's, as it happens, is within clear line of sight of the Los Angeles International Airport flight path. If he times it just right, Roa will capture that elusive and peculiar thing he has been chasing for nearly a year now: a photograph of a plane silhouetted against the moon."

For want of a diaper

"So Russell is spending an absurd amount of time not on curriculum or fund raising for equipment but on acquiring diapers. It’s not the kind of task she expected to dominate her days when she took the position, but lack of enough diapers is threatening to eat the Center’s mission alive."

That is a lot of drama

The royal romances of King Carol II of Romania.

 

I always suspected ouija boards would do that

"You’re terrible at this, Ouija board!  You used to spell lots of things in high school!  Granted, Kelly was pushing the planchette but still!  This is crap!"