I’ve gotten the monthly archive looking decent now. I think all I have left is the comments…what a pain in the ass. I may or may not get the comments looking decent tonight.

The style continues to weird out sometimes in IE, although it always looks fine in Forefox. I think I’ll leave it as it is. I’m tired of messing with it. It’s always at least readable.

Update: I’ve got the comment templates working, so everything should be pretty now. If something isn’t pretty, let me know!

What is it with people who refuse to use proper capitalization? I had a run-in with one of these on Big Fat Blog, a linguistics master’s student, nonetheless. Being in a linguistics-related field myself, normally I’d be really interested in what this person has to say. But the combination of the pretentionusness of not using proper capitalization with the fact that it’s just too damn difficult to read what this person writes pretty much guarantees that I’m going to be skipping all her posts. Capitalization exists for a reason, ya know. Just now I was reading Alternet, and saw an article about someone called “asha bandele”. Not “Asha Bandele”, but “asha bandele”. How is this anything but incredibly pretentious? Do these people think that by refusing to capitalize they’re somehow sticking it to The Man? Rather, they’re insuring that I won’t bother to read what they have to say. It just makes me roll my eyes. It’s your name so I guess you’ve got a right to write it however you want, but then I have a right to ignore you. Nothing gets on my nerves more then pretentiousness. Ugh, get a life!

Feministe » Thoughts about Italy

The second half of this post on differences in bodily display between Europe and the US really spoke to me. I remember the first time I went to a swimming hall here in Norway. I hadn’t realized it when I’d agreed to go swimming, but the posted rules required swimmers to strip off their suits completely and shower in a communal shower before entering the pool. I was a little shocked at first, but I managed to strip off my suit, shower, and enter the pool with little ado. It probably helped that I was with another large friend and her even-larger-than-me husband.

Since then, I haven’t had any difficulties stripping naked in locker rooms, being in a swimsuit in public bathing areas, or showing some skin in the summer. I know that size acceptance was what’s helped me the most here, but I don’t think I’d have been able to use this skill of showing myself without shame if it hadn’t been for the nonchalant environment here. People just accept that some people are fat. I feel like just another part of the scenery, and not in a bad way. I don’t feel like a freak at all when I’m naked or scantily clad in public, not like I would expect to feel in the US. I think a lot of fat people–a lot of people, in general, actually–would benefit by spending a summer in Europe, swimming and just being in the streets.

Johannes and I were watching The Manchurian Candidate the other day, and someone asked the protagonist this question. I automatically bristled, as I’ve been asked that question quite a few times in the past, but I didn’t think about it much more at the time. I’ve had some time to think about it now, and I know why I despise this question:

1. It’s extremely condescending. It places the questioner over the questionee in the hierarchy of mental stability.
2. It implies that the questionee is incapable of taking care of herself.
3. It implies that the questionee is behaving or speaking as inappropriately as (the stereotypes of) a psychiatric patient who needs to be medicated but isn’t.
4. It implies that the questionee is incapable of judging whether or not her actions or words are appropriate.
5. It implies that the questionee is unfit in her un-medicated state.

So don’t ever ask me whether or not I’ve been taking my meds. It’s hard enough for a psychiatric patient to make the decision to take psychotropic drugs. For some of us, it’s hard enough to be med-compliant. We also have to struggle with issues of identity–am I still me when I’m on the meds? When I was on the meds, I couldn’t manage anything, and now I can–so can it be me who’s accomplishing things now? This thoughtless question only makes med-compliance more difficult because it reinforces the idea that you’re not you when you’re on your meds, and you-off-meds isn’t acceptable. It’s hard enough to deal with these issues–we damn sure don’t need to deal with this kind of paternalism to boot. So kindly stop and think before you ask someone this question.

…Which brings me to this month’s Alchera Project. This month we’ve been given the option to write about how the music industry is changing with the advent of easily replicable music formats. I’ve got a collection of around 9000 mp3s, about 43 gigs worth of music, and like I said, I’m very proud of it. It’s comprised of files that I originally got from Jason when he set up my computer for me in 1997, rips of my CDs, and both legal and illegal downloads. Most of the legal downloads came from Emusic, to which I’ve recently re-subscribed.

I can’t say I’m proud of the fact that I illegally download music, but that doesn’t stop me. Why do I download some songs and buy other songs on CD? At this moment I’m listening to an illegally downloaded song, “Ready, Steady, Go” by Paul Oakenfold. It’s pretty typical of songs I download–individual songs that I’ve heard someplace and really liked. In this case, it was playing in the club scene of “Collateral”, which Johannes and I watched on DVD the other day. I’ve downloaded a lot of those songs playing in club scenes in movies (Blade, The Matrix, etc.). When I’m not familiar with artists, or only like some of what the artist produces, I’ll generally just download.

The last few times I’ve bought music on CD, I’ve had a difficult time burning it into mp3 format, which is intolerable for me given that I only listen to mp3s, either on my computer or mp3 player. We haven’t even got a stereo system. I was never able to rip the latest Duran Duran CD and ended up having to download the mp3s, which made me wonder why I’d bothered to even buy the CD in the first place. I’ve got so many CDs now that I’ve never listened to directly–I’ve only popped them into my computer’s DVD drive to burn them. Thereafter they moulder on the shelves of my CD organizer.

I just bought the new Anneli Drecker CD after having been unsuccessful at downloading it (illegally). It was actually available for download at the same place I bought the physical CD, but the download cost 99 kroner (about 15 USD) and was in WMA format, while the CD cost 178 kroner including shipping(about 27 bucks, and yes, that is a typical price for a new CD here in Norway). Given the relatively small price difference and the fact that the miles were encoded in WMA and probably had some lame-ass copyright protection, I just opted to purchase the CD. If it hadn’t been a Norwegian artist, I would likely have worked harder to download the songs illegally. Norwegian artists are almost all I bother do purchase anymore; I download the rest.

So what do I think about all this? I think that if legal music downloads were available at a reasonable price, I’d generally buy them. More music has to be available, though–not just mainstream music or music from large labels. The prices have to be reasonable, too: a buck is on the high end of reasonable, while the 10 kroner I’d have paid per song for the new Anneli Drecker album (about a buck fifty) is not. I think that if there were some way of donating to artists directly, I’d probably do that if I was happy with work of theirs that I’d downloaded illegally. In any case, I’d rather donate directly to the artist rather than having most of my cash be siphoned off by middlemen. Copy protection on digital music files and CDs pisses me off, to the extent that I’ll download illegally rather than jump through those hoops. I do not take well to people telling me how I can and cannot use my property.

So I still shell out some cash, and I still fire up Soulseek from time to time. But I don’t feel entirely comfortable doing either.

Technorati: Tag: fridayshuffle

OK, I give up, I’ll do it! For those of you living under a rock, Friday Random 10 is where you fire up your music player, set the tracks to play randomly, and list up the first 10. I’ve avoided doing this because I avoid most blogmemes–I generally actually want to have something to say, instead of posting jsut to be like everyone else. Bit I figure hey, I haven’t been posting much lately, so I may as well. I’m very proud of my music collection, actually, so it’s also an excuse to feel cool. Here she is:

1. Delerium - Decade
2. Hardfloor - Mustard Cornflakes
3. Wünsch, Christian - Everything is Ruined A1
4. Biswas, Kingsuk - K-Ascendant
5. Aedena Cycle - Weep for Me
6. Front 242 - Melt (Again)
7. PFM - One and Only
8. Bel Canto - All I Want to Do
9. Tactile Vs. 0 - Intervention 2
10. Depeche Mode - Useless (The Kruder and Dorfmeister Session)