RIP Christopher Hitchens 13/4/49 – 15/12/11

HR: if they work 40 hours a week u have to give them benefits

Big company: hmm okay. They shall work 39

Simple explanation of the bills that farmers in India are protesting - in TikTok form!

"Apple has more cash than the US Government"

What a fucking stupid comparison.

While Apple are busy mugging gullible hipsters for their cash, the US Govt are trying to pick up the pieces of what the previous administration left behind. W spent 5 trillion dollars he didn't have on pursuing his various policies and Obama has had to spend 1.4 trillion on repairing the damage, given that the world is in recession and yet idiots with more money than sense are still throwing their cash at Apple, what a fucking surprise.

I really do feel sorry for Obama, if he wasn't picking up W's left behind crap, and wasn't having to cope with a hostile house, he could be doing so much good for the US - but hey, people never want things that are good for them, right?

yesterday, tumblr totally deleted the account of a prominent trans girl on this website because she was posting safe for work transition timeline photos. this is supposedly "the queerest place on the internet" but i haven't seen anybody but trans girls talking about this. why does nobody else give a fuck?

my unpopular opinion is that i hate tiktok because now people just publicly watch loud ass videos in public spaces with no regard for anyone else. 100% it was not this bad with youtube, it’s such a different thing with tiktok. put on headphones. you are grown.

i think a lot about Angua ad Carrot’s personal arcs in Feet of Clay, and as part of how the book seems a lot about identity or claiming your identity via Dorfl and Cheery (Dorfl being declaring that he OWNS himself, and Cheery being the first Discworld dwarf to say ‘I am She’, and both of them starting cultural revolutions by simply saying “I am who I am”)

and the relevant point is that they start out on opposite sides of sympathizing.

Carrot’s reactions to Cheery speaks for itself. And they’re bad, and worse for the fact that it’s Carrot doing it. He comes off as very much the tradtionalist dwarf he was raised as, with quietly acidic comments like ‘I’m pretty sure my mother is a woman but at least she has the decency not to show it’ and other, even nastier things. It might not have been written as transphobic but it sure as hell reads like it. Most notably, it actually gets Angua pretty steamed, given that she keeps things close to the chest and conceals her feelings. It gets her genuinely pissed. It’s unsettling, like his Men At Arms bigotry towards the undead.

But. Carrot is the only one, throughout a large chunk of the book, to treat golems as people. Everyone else considers them mindless machines, and even Nobby and Colon, who are usually totally harmless, flat out try to use Detritus’ crossbow to kill Dorfl when he is offline; nobody trusts golems, who can do nothing but endlessly labor forever and suffer in silence, deprived of even a voice for themselves, and no one admits they are alive. And as Vime later thinks, that the real reason people are so scared of them is that they know they would deserve it if the Fantasy Robot Revolution came for them, after the way they mistreat the golems.

Carrot is the one to believe in Dorfl, to fight for him, and who believes that what is happening to the golems is wrong.

Angua is Cheery’s only friend at first. She’s the one who helps Cheery accomodating herself to more feminine things that are extremely new for a dwarf, she’s even protective of Cheery and desperately hides that she is a werewolf, knowing that Cheery hates people like her. She inspires Cheery towards what becomes the bedrock of the dwarfish openly female-presenting movement, and its a very humanizing and good thing from their friendship.

She’s also, put bluntly, a vicious and even cruel figure whenever golems are around. She openly regards them as non-sentient machines, hates them effectively because it helps her to have someone to look down on as an undead, and she rationalizes their horrific treatment and endless servitude as ‘being accepted’. She even gets mad at Carrot for empathizing with them and not her, specifically, though she does note that she is asking him to be unfair.

Much of their respective character development in Feet of Clay is their subtle growing over the worst aspects of themselves in this particular book. Carrot grows into less of a traditionalist with knee-jerk reactions, and Angua grows to empathize with the golems and view them as people.

Perhaps most relevant is the capstone to both their character arcs?

Using the pronouns Dorfl and Cheery prefer.

Day Eleven - Being an only child

I've grown up without brothers or sisters, don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have a brother or a sister to share stuff with and to annoy and to play stupid games with, but I've always respected the decision that my parents came to.

Being an only child has been boring and somewhat lonely over the years but it has had it's advantages: it's taught me how to entertain myself and make the most of otherwise boring stretches, it's taught me to value company and friendship when it presents itself, it's taught me to be self sufficient to some extent and it's given me an unrestricted relationship with my parents - I don't have brothers or sisters to compete with for attention or praise or sweets, so I suppose to some extent it has spoiled me but due to the financial difficulties of our family, this has been tempered and I have learned to be resourceful with what I can get.

Do I regret not growing up with brothers and sisters? alittle maybe, it would be nice to have a younger sibling to look out for or an older sibling to learn from, but as things stand at the moment I wouldn't change a thing; it's made me the person I am today and given me a fantastic relationship with my parents and some solid and long lasting friendships that I wouldn't trade for all the money ever minted.

Nik.

Some call it cheating, I just call it winning.

via XKCD