CATGIRL GOTH RAVE and other stuff!

[rax]

Your weekly "not school, not pokemon" post:

• CATGIRL GOTH RAVE IS ON. We are booked for December 18th in San Francisco. This will be our sixth year; if people fly in from other places (I'm looking at you, Boston, Seattle, and Texas) I expect between us we'll set up some additional social events in the days before and after as well. Selene is looking approvingly at me as I write this post; you know you want to be there. More details and a formal invitation that can be passed around will go out in a couple of weeks.
• I lost two productive evenings this week to eating things I shouldn't have, both by accident. The first, my housemate was not only kind enough to make me a separate bowl of guac without tomato in it, but he even went and got new tortilla chips when the ones he had bought had jalapeno on them. (nightshade!) He came back with Tostitos with lime. This was totally not his fault, but still. :( The second was entirely my fault; I forgot paprika was a nightshade and was so excited that I had found a tofu curry thing that didn't use any nightshades. Yeah, no. Goodbye, productive Thursday night.
• In other "I am increasingly ready for a robot body" news, I twisted my ankle something fierce when my brand-new heels snapped --- the heel half-detaching from the shoe --- as I was walking down the stairs in my house. (Carefully!) They're handmade by an awesome company who I hope will either repair or replace them, but it's still kind of errrrrgh, since it hurts enough that I wasn't able to go hiking this morning and can't walk or bike long distances right now. It already feels better than it did this morning; I'm hoping I will be OK to take the bus to school on Monday and walk the ten-fifteen minutes from the city bus stop rather than having to navigate the campus buses as well. I do still have a cane, if it comes to that!
• While we're itemizing negative things --- commit your atrocities early, kids! --- yesterday evening I was getting a ride from a friend and while she was turning left a car came at us at like 50mph. Directly at me. Part of my brain enacted what I would do to get out of the situation were I driving, part of my brain attempted to communicate this to the driver (but I think came out "Guh!!"), and part of my brain prepared itself for death. I am darkly amused that that process returned the value "I was hoping for something more glamorous." By my recollection the car did not hit us; the driver checked the car and there was a nasty gash down the side where I had been sitting. I probably dissociated. No one was hurt, the other person hit and ran. "At least I wasn't on a bike?" [0]
• In other news, I don't have to spend my free days going to Ohio for work for a while! How cool is that? (Answer: VERY COOL.) I will miss the jacuzzi in the hotel where they know my name when I check in though. "Oh, it's the pink-haired lady who checks in dressed like a college student and leaves in the morning in formal businesswear! She gets room 409."
• Still don't want to jinx it, but the likelihood of picking up a Housemate #2 next weekend is like 80 or 90%; my "turn down OK to good people in favor of waiting for good to awesome people" strategy appears to be working like whoah.
• Anyone have recommendations for bike lights that, rather than optimizing for "being seen" like the ones I have, provide the functionality "allow me to see?" I have a halogen that theoretically does this but it's not really cutting it for me. While biking around here during the day is way tamer than Boscamberville, it's kind of a death trap at night; the students are insane and the roads are dark enough that I can't see. Since I don't yet have all the roads memorized, and where the potholes are and that sort of thing, this is a pretty major problem, and it's starting to be dark when I get out of class. I can't fix the student insanity (there is no way I would bike through campus at 10pm on a weekend night, I like not dying) but I should be able to fix the darkness, and it's getting dark earlier every day.
• This is technically school-related, but I got permission from my advisor to work on human/animal boundary things, and animality in general, in my research both for her class and in general. This is so cool, y'all. So cool. I have so much more to read now! I even got permission to do "some crazy first-person vegan furry thing" informed by theory --- this is the class where we're encouraged to write experimentally, which I mentioned before. We will see how this goes. I have already started outlining. I want to make this good.
• You know how lots of minivans and SUVs have those stick figure decals that show you who's in the family? I saw one the other day that was clearly legible as soldier-man gardener-wife basketball-girl football-boy baseball-boy and four dogs. I thought "Man, I wanna see one where both parents are women. Or where there are three adults. Or where their careers are things like computer-woman, management-androgyne, bookworm-child." I got to thinking --- how far into weird could you go before people would just start not seeing the weird and parsing it as something else? I think that a family that otherwise looked normal but had two gardener-wives and no man would read as lesbian parents, especially if combined with left-leaning bumper stickers or something. If you had two men and a woman, on the other hand, I think most people would assume one of them was either a grandparent or an adult child before thinking menage a trois. I think it would be interesting to see how far you could go before people snapped back to normativizing interpretations, and would be particularly interesting to compare this across populations and times. I was thinking "Somebody should do this research!" and then I thought "I'm a paid staff member in gender studies at a research university..." I'm probably not going to do this project, but I could, and that's badass. (Feel free to grab it if you want.)

[0] This particular situation could not possibly have happened to me on a bike, but the general case of "grazed by fast-moving car" would probably have been worse.

Comments

[jld]

Anyone have recommendations for bike lights that, rather than optimizing for "being seen" like the ones I have, provide the functionality "allow me to see?"

I have one of these that I got when I was biking in the winter in Greater Cambridge and really needed more visibility of my potential icy death than the streetlights were giving me. I like it pretty well, but I haven't actually tried using any of its competition; I found a website (or two) that had photos of different headlights in similar conditions and mostly went on that. Actually, I think I showed you it the time I was over at your place after you'd just gotten your current phone, if you remember that.

You know how lots of minivans and SUVs have those stick figure decals that show you who's in the family?

…Either I've never lived anywhere where people have done that, or I've been more than usually unobservant. (This has, however, caused me to enter “klingon time travel dagger” into Google.)

[rebelsheart]

Speaking of everyone's favorite 151 251 (... I give up...) collectible battle pets:

20 Re-imagined pokémon http://su.pr/59cXj9

[movingfinger]

On the bike lights, the new LED ones are better than the halogen ones. They're also cheaper. (Those $4.99 brilliant-white LED flashlights at Walgreen's ought to be putting the insane $400 bike lights off the shelves just by existing.) I believe a lot of people are just grabbing a cheap flashlight nowadays and using a Twofish holder to put it on the bike. Use two if you like.

[bookofjude]

That "my family" thing has spread to America? I find it exceedingly cheap and creepily personal. I do not want to drive around with a "hey, I have a wife, two kids, three dogs and a skateboard" plastered to the back of my car. Apparently I'm one of a few people skeeved by sharing lots of personal information online, judging by the Facebook Generation(tm).

Secondly, did I share the information that, as part of the brassica family, mustard (specifically, mustard seeds) are a spicy addition to a variety of meals! I haven't actually yet done anything interesting with them, and I'm not sure how much you would need as opposed to an actual chilli powder. Also, I keep meaning to visit the local spice shop and quiz them for awesome spices that aren't nightshades... I'm hoping they'll be knowledgable enough to know what's what. There are a lot of obscure and awesome spices that I know I can have, so I'm enthusiastic.

[damerell]

LEDs have won, but don't get too enthusiastic; they look brighter than they are, working better for being seen than seeing, and there's a reason everyone isn't using those $5 LED torches for all that they look jolly bright.

In Europe I would recommend a hub dynamo and B&M IQ Fly / IQ Cyo or Schmidt Edelux headlight (depending on how flush you are feeling) but they could be hideously expensive over there.

[weirdquark]

Texas is having however many Sassafrass people visit around and after the 18th of December. It is not set when all or any of them are showing up and I don't remember if anyone can come that early or not. Possibly all visitations happen between Christmas and New Years. In any case, I will be working on the 18th; no idea about the rest of us.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was talking with gaudior about this the other day, and ended up determining that there was no way I could definitely not schedule over Sassafrass, since those times weren't set in stone yet, and I really needed to lock down a date. :/ It is sad that you will not be able to make it! But I will see you at some point in the near future. :)

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

first-person vegan furry thing" informed by theory

would you be interested in explaining how "vegan" works in this context? i'm curious and having a failure of imagination...

[rax.livejournal.com]

At a really simple level, "if we dissolve the boundary between ourselves and animals, at least partially, and accept that animals have some amount of agency and responsibility in the universe, it starts to become a dicey ethical proposition to eat them." Of course you can make the same argument about plants and so this isn't really an ironclad "oh my god! Everyone needs to become vegan right now!" But especially from the texts we've been reading in class, if one accepts that our becoming-animal has a parallel animal becoming-human, it at least raises the question of how we should interact with non-human animals in our lives, and veganism is one possible answer.

I'm still working on this connection; there are already some works on veganism and feminist theory (Carol Adams in particular) and there's also a book by Donna Haraway I intend to read. Hopefully I'll be able to articulate where I'm going with this better in a couple of months. :)

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

it definitely has interesting parallels with ethical questions about animal experimentation, which has recently been on my mind a great deal.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Oh that's a very good point, thank you!

Not that I have a useful response or anything but it's something else to chew on.

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

yeah, as we move more into systems biology and more directly study the organism in terms of a web of interactions rather than linear control pathways or loops, we are faced more and more with the dilemma that we are investigating things that inherently cannot be modelled in an in vitro system - we have to study the phenomenon in the context of a whole living organism. This has been on my mind a lot because I recently accepted a postdoctoral position in which I will be studying the relationship between inflammation, mutation, and DNA repair. Inflammation is a phenomenon that is sufficiently complicated that we can't model it in vitro, which means that i will be working with mice that have been genetically engineered to be highly predisposed to chronic pathological inflammation and / or deficient in DNA repair. while in the abstract the scientific problem is pretty much a dream come true for me, i found that the related ethics of whether or not to accept the position were ...challenging, so say the least. i ended up doing a lot of research on guidelines for animal protocols and having conversations with the PI to the effect of "if i am going to do this research, i need a firm understanding that i will be allowed, without prejudice, to adhere to an ethical standard regarding treatment of these animals that is acceptable to me, even if this causes more cost/inconvenience, and here is what is and is not acceptable to me."
I believe that the research that I will be doing is important, and I think, after serious reflection, that the cost/benefit analysis comes out in favor of research on animals in this context. But when i was a lab tech, i was required to carry out procedures that i considered inhumane, even though they were technically allowed. I am never, ever, ever going to knowingly accept a position in which i will be even pressured, never mind required, to treat animals in a manner that i consider incompatible with basic compassion towards another conscious individual.

[goddess32585.livejournal.com]

I ran into a new-to-me twist on animal agency several weeks ago, when someone asserted that if you object to bestiality on the grounds of lack of consent, being vegan and otherwise refraining from animal products is the only consistent stance open to you.

I'm still working through that one; I suspect I may end up in the 'happy to be irrational about this issue' place.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Despite holding all of those positions, I'm not sure that logically has to follow. In particular I don't think that by necessity disallows free-range eggs. But I dunno.

[goddess32585.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, I should've been more precise - you're right, more nuanced forms of animal product consumption probably are permissible, to the degree you can ascertain motivation.*

The argument being made was not that everyone in the audience should be an ethical veg*n [facially absurd, I think, to the speaker], but rather that everyone should be 100% on board with bestiality, or at least admit that they're incredible hypocrites about it.

*Now I'm picturing someone being all 'what, my cat brought me these mice! b/c she cares! want more casserole?'

[kilroi.livejournal.com]

On the stickers on the back of the vehicles front, I did once see a vehicle that had a sticker for a man, and a sticker for a cat, in sum toto. I was highly entertained, and continue to tell this story to this day (as seen above! I am so meta!)

[rax.livejournal.com]

...that is amazing. I am kind of tempted.

[cat-in-dminor.livejournal.com]

You know. If Prop 19 passes this would be a PERFECT excuse for me to go to cali X3. I want to coooome! D:

[rax.livejournal.com]

You shouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuld!

[schrodi-kitten.livejournal.com]

I want a set of those sticker people for my car!

Well, to be more precise, I want to place them on the drivers' side door, and have big red X's stamped through them, like stamped-out swastikas on a WWII-era fighter jet.

[...]

I'm not really social.

[rax.livejournal.com]

That is an option! Although it might send the wrong message to pedestrians.

[hebinekohime (from livejournal.com)]

Death Kittenrace 2000?