Loretta Ross

So I started watching Anita Sarkeesian videos on youtube, and as kind of a 'know your enemy' type thing I watched a couple of videos that countered her points. For the most part, these videos had arguments that I didn't find sound and struck me as typical of the things we have been hearing from anti-feminists for a long time now. I don't wholeheartedly agree with what Anita Sarkeesian is doing myself, but the backlash against her is full of logic that I consider bad and sometimes seemed more interested in attacking Sarkeesian personally than coming up with a justified counter-argument.

So I watched a few videos like that, and I watched the same crap I usually watch on Youtube, which includes but is not limited to The Whitest Kids U Know (who can make jokes concerning gender that are understandably controversial), and speeches by Christopher Hitchens (who is a dead man that I agree with aproximately 100% of the time when he's not talking about women), and music by Frank Zappa (ditto) and it's pretty clear suddenly why every other video that youtube 'Recommended for you' has been about why feminism sucks and is bad because  it tells men not to rape women which must mean it thinks it's totally okay for women to rape men or some shit like that.

In case you hadn't guessed, I don't really want to watch some loser talking about that kind of garbage for hours on end, so what I've been doing is going through and watching various feminist speakers that I recall enjoying from my college days, in the hope that maybe youtube will get the point and stop trying to show misogyny down my throat.

And I recalled Loretta Ross, a woman whom I'd enjoyed a speech by back when I was like 19 or 20, though I hardly remember what it was about. I looked her up, and she is just right on. The speech I watched of hers tonight is a little out-of-context and longer than most youtube videos people have patience for (or at least I have patience for) but totally worth watching.

I just remembered that I hate everythng.

I have no job. I have no home. I have a vehicle that stopped running for the umpteenth time yesterday. I've been staying at at Matts' house in Irvine for a while, and it's been like a week now and people are starting to get sick of me. I'm stinky and messy. I know this, and I'm into it. Other people don't like it so much. I'm sitting here watching this show It's Always Sunning In Philadelphia, and at first I thought it was kind of funny, but now I'm getting kind of sick of it. There's this one woman on the show, who at first I thought wasn't that cute, but she wears tight jeans and lo-tops a lot and she pulls it off really well. Other than that, I have no extra-platonic interest in her.

I feel like I need the sage wisdom of someone. For some stupid reason, I thought that if I stayed in Southern California, I'd be able to find a job and place to live that fit into my personality and life goals. So far the only thing I've accomplished since leaving my former position is getting my truck down here, which would be terrific if it worked. I've been trying to get caught up on 30 Rock, so I watched like 3 episodes the other day, and I envy how Tina Fey's character has a sort of mentor that she can go to for advice when her life becomes difficult. I could go to my father, but I'm not sure I'm able to agree with the advice he gives. He might tell me to move back in with him, which I'm not going to do. I started to watch Gladiator the other night, and I felt bad because I don't go to my father to capitalize on his wisdom like the people in that movie do.

I think there may be a belief that some people carry that the two things holding people back are fear and laziness. I don't agree with this view in a socio-political context, but certainly fear and laziness work to hold people back pretty regularly. I'm not really afraid of anything, except for heights and needles. I literally stood fifty feet away from a bear once and fiddled with my new cell phone for a full minute trying to figure out how to get the camera to work before realizing that, were the bear to decide to be mean, I was making the wrong decisions, and I walked away slowly. I'm not afraid of bears. I'm not foolhardy around them, but I'm not afraid of them. But I digress. I think everyone who knows me knows that I'm wicked lazy though. Is that my problem though? There's matters of my life that I haven't been lazy about, yet I don't feel I've been successful anyway. I feel like I need instruction with some things, and I get advice about these things from a lot of people, but none of it seems to be worth listening to. For example, about an hour ago Matts told me I ought to get a haircut if I want to get a job. I told him it depends on the job. He said no it didn't. I gave the example of coffee shops, because alt people work in coffee shops pretty regularly. He said getting a haircut would be especially important for coffee shops, because if you have long hair it could fall into people's coffee. While I see his point, I'm not sure if that would actually be the reason a coffee shop would decline employment to me based on hair. After all, women can be baristas and nobody gives a shit how long their hair is.

I guess the best thing to do at this point would be to try to get up early tomorrow and fix the truck. I needed to write though. It lets off some anxiety.

Jane McGonigal

We have a lot of old issues of Time and Smithsonian in our bathroom. I was looking through an old Smithsonian for something to read yesterday, and I came across an article about Jane McGonigal, a game designer who makes games with the expressed intent of improving people's lives and making them smarter. I didn't read the whole article, because I didn't have to spend that much time in the bathroom, but first and foremost, let's reflect on what a huge undertaking that is. After I read the first part of that article, I immediately went to my computer and started playing Postal 2. The premise of Postal 2 is to put the player through a series of tedious tasks that will encourage her to eventually start killing people for fun. This is the sort of thing McGonigal is up against. Educational games have rarely stood up to their non-educational competitors. Oregon Trail is probably the most popular educational game of all time, and the only real fun part of that game was hunting, which was decidedly the least educational aspect. How many times have you been hunting in Oregon Trail and decided to stop after you shot 200 pounds of meat, since you couldn't carry any more back to the wagon? I'm thinking never.
Also, at my elementary school we didn't have enough computers for every student to have one, so we doubled up on computers. When we were playing Oregon Trail, my computer partner was Travis Leech. We decided that I get the keyboard and he get the mouse. It seemed like a pretty egalitarian decision, except what that meant, as it turned out, was that he got to do all the hunting, and I got to type in how many wagon axles to purchase. Oh boy!
Also, at the last LAN party I went to, I got all kinds of hammered, and butted into someone else who was playing, and tried to do a similar thing, where I had the keyboard and he had the mouse. I told him that we would play a lot better because two heads were better than one. My memory of our playing is foggy, but I'm pretty sure we kicked major ass. We were playing Half Life 2 Deathmatch, I think.

Women who are into video games is another aspect of Jane McGonigal's interview that I find sort of curious. I was really into computer games in high school, and at the time, there were few boys and fewer girls who were into computer games. After high school, I started to develop a stimulating social life, and I dropped video games in a big way. Apparently, at some point after this, women began playing video games much more than before. A friend told me it was the introduction of World of Warcraft that brought this on. I've never played World of Warcraft, and nothing about the premise has ever made it sound appealing to me. At any rate, if girls are into video games now, this is a dramatic and perplexing change to the subject matter that men and women can have in common. This is actually something that's been my undoing at times, because I still am not that into video games. Sure, they're a great way to waste time and it's something to do when you're listening to music on your computer, but beyond that, I'm not passionate about video games. I've literally had women try to talk to me about video games and I've been at a loss on numerous occasions. So now I'm getting passed up by women because I don't have enough video game experience. Wow. I'm not saying 'wow' like the abbreviation for 'World of Warcraft.' I'm saying 'Wow' like 'Wow, that's fucking weird.'
Jane McGonigal should produce a game that helps me to know more about video games for when I have to talk to women about them.

Also, my high school chemistry teacher was named Mr. McGonigal. I wonder if they're related.