Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Sunday, August 17th, 2008
Though I’ve been somewhat diligent about posting lately, I’ve been taking a long break from reading other blogs. Took a look at some of my feeds today and as usual, Brownfemipower is writing amazing stuff about why “private matters” are not just “private matters.” Also as usual, the comments are top notch.
An excerpt:
even more to the point–while young promising male congressional employees hobnob and network with other men to get to the or high power senator position, young promising women congressional employees are being manipulated and fucked with by dirty old man fuckwads. or they’re marrying dirty young man fuckwads in the hopes of helping their own careers.
and queer women of color are being thrown in prison for giving the police the finger. is it any wonder that cynthia mckinney had her run ins with the law? if a black woman can’t be fucked, what good is she/what the hell is she doing at the doors of Congress?
And my latest favorite picture -
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Saturday, August 16th, 2008
I’ve been working my way through an Aperture lesson book (image organizing/light photo editing program) and didn’t think I could stand looking at and reading the dry text about sending one’s photos to scout “locations” with your “selects” for “a possible a job” one more time. Figured I’d liven up the web gallery lesson by using my own pictures and uploading to the site.
As easy as it was to get something decent looking, there doesn’t seem to be any way to mix vertical and horizontal images without getting ugly gaps on the index page. Unless I’m missing something, that’s an epic fail. And as usual, severe desaturation in Firefox!! Argh technology.
Some of the stuff has been uploaded before, some not. Had great success with some color saturation editing tonight and am pretty excited about it.
gwytherinn.com aperture gallery
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Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
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Saturday, August 9th, 2008
Well. In the previous post I tried to weave a common thread through a bunch of things, but I’m not sure I really succeeded. I’m sick of this idea that freedom and democracy are about having the “choice” to own things like an SUV and about the “right” to consume an inordinate amount of the world’s resources while others pay for it in very serious ways. While narrowing access to birth control, weakening civil rights, and the torture and rape of men and women in overseas prisons isn’t a violation of any of this, as long as you can drive your choice of car and disturb places you have no business going. I feel like our idea of the concepts of freedom and choice, our rights, has become completely twisted, and I wanted to share one of the quotes that first directed me towards that line of thinking. (Favorite part bolded.)
I can only articulate my understanding of the laws that have survived and been bequeathed to me. I understand that the laws were obeyed not through armed force that was alienated from the people - such as the police, army, etc. - but rather because the people agreed with the laws. In fact, they formulated them in the best interests of the community.
Therefore I can understand democracy. The will of the people was sacred to our leaders. This is one of our strongest traditions. No Native person accepts his or her leader’s direction as a command. Conversely, only fools accept that a society that requires force to ensure proper social conduct is a democratic one. Without the voice of the trammelled and the dispossessed, democracy is but an echo in the canyons of the minds of lunatics.
I understand that my foremothers were an austere, disciplined people and were absolutely opposed to waste of any sort. Their standards of honesty were established by those people who contributed most to the well-being of the community and the nation as a whole. It was criminal to use another to enrich oneself; by this, I understand that exploitation of the land or people, in the interest of profit, was prohibited.
- I am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism
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Friday, August 1st, 2008
Today a coworker alerted me to the latest development of Bush and the Christian Right’s bid to declare official ownership of my reproductive organs. Apparently they are considering a ruling that will classify birth control as abortion, making it more difficult to get.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them “abortion.” These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.
…
These rules pose a serious threat to providers and uninsured and low-income Americans seeking care. They could prevent providers of federally-funded family planning services, like Medicaid and Title X, from guaranteeing their patients access to the full range of comprehensive family planning services. They’ll also build significant barriers to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services for those who need it most: low-income and uninsured women and men.
I know it’s a general difficulty to grasp, but please consider that I’m a human being and not a walking fetus incubator. Another more technical post about it here - HHS Moves to Define Contraception as Abortion.
I’ve been encountering more of the “It’s my right to own an SUV” set lately when I listen to Sean Hannity’s show on the way home from work. They were lambasting Obama today because he was suggesting that - get this - people should take responsibility for the maintenance of their cars so they use less gas. Wait, what? Taking responsibility for something?? These people don’t seem to get the idea of responsibility unless they’re shoving it down someone else’s throat. (But then, apparently birth control isn’t good enough. Apologies for missing the patriarchal purity ball, but I’m not interested in abstinence.)
I love the continuous strain that runs through the show of how they (The radical environmentalists and radical left - don’t you know radical is a compliment?) are “taking away our freedoms.” They want to stop you from driving your SUVs! The environmental extremists won’t let us drill in ANWR!!! They’re stopping us from developing nuclear power!!!!! Speaking of ANWR, I found a lovely post the other day on the subject of drilling in ANWR.
Apparently their take on freedom is “I’m a well off white person and they’re not letting me consume as much as I want.” What it takes to maintain this standard of living and carry out these things is apparently inconsequential. That the planned storage site for nuclear waste is Yucca Mountain, Navajo ancestral lands? To be concerned about that would mean you’d have to think of someone other than yourself, and furthermore, people of color. Would also mean you’d have to stop being discriminatory towards Native American religious beliefs, but that’s not something we hear about in the news - especially with a “war on Christmas” to fight. ANWR Drilling would mean possibly destroying the Gwinich’in tribe’s way of life, as it is dependent upon the caribou and their migration patterns. According to the previous link, 229 tribes oppose ANWR drilling. (Shit, now I’m really being a hippy treehugger, huh?)
The Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay (This had been a prison for Haitians with AIDs before its infamy - can be read about in Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power.), and Abu Ghraib on the other hand, do not factor into these people’s definition of freedom. At least some of you can sleep better at night thinking that narrowing civil liberties and torturing/raping people will actually protect one’s way of life (As always, others rot for it and bear the brunt of it - but maybe not for long at this rate.) from terrorism. And while we can’t seem to get our dander up over the violation of these living people’s rights and freedoms we’ll count every (white) fetus that has been aborted (murdered!), whether through the procedure itself or goddess forbid - an egg does not get implanted on the uterine lining because of BIRTH CONTROL! (1. There is NO scientific proof of that. and 2. THAT’S THE POINT.)
Squawking about personal responsibility is just fine when you’re trying to force abstinence on women, scoffing at those who can’t get by on their Wal Mart minimum wage or demonizing immigrants. But when it comes to your damn SUV, your American right (freedom!) to guzzle gas, and a fine cocktail of ignorance and manifest destiny, step aside.
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Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
This photo missed the mark for me in color.. did some experimental post processing on it last night, and I really like it. The intended goal was to make it black and white but I really liked the washed out colors and upped contrast. Click the picture to see both this and the color one.
Going out in a minute to go get a new lens - Nikon 50mm f/1.8.
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Monday, July 28th, 2008
I didn’t realize my laptop wasn’t plugged in and just lost half a post to a shut down. ANYWAY.
I promise I’ll get to slightly less boring things in the near future, as soon as I finish chronicling web site failures and hosting issues (and who knows what else at this rate!), dear loyal readers, 1 or 2 that you are. But since sleep and I don’t seem to be friends lately, I figured I’d regale you with the run in I had with luck today. (Of the bad variety.)
Among some of the things I’ve run into in the past few weeks, I had a ton of sensor gook, and it’s shown up in about 600 pictures now which makes me feel like an idiot. I kept thinking I had gotten it in the lenses only to see that I hadn’t. And then realized one of my lens’s polarizing filters is gone. Filters don’t just fall off. The viewfinder rubber piece has fallen off as well. So while these things were irritations, today was just bad.
After five years of owning my lovely Nikon D100 SLR camera I dropped it for the first time today. Usually I’m pretty paranoid and careful about my camera, but today carelessness and stupidity prevailed. I did not close my camera bag after taking a few shots with it, at which point camera hit pavement when I dragged my bag out of the car.
Ugh.
I think the sound must have stopped my heart for a moment.
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
Gradually continuing to untangle myself from ipower and their increasingly atrocious hosting. I foolishly registered the domain of the other site I run with ipower. I wasn’t aware of the risks or consequences involved with this at the time but I successfully transfered the domain to name.com last week. I can now proceed with moving the site to a new host without fear of losing the domain, and should probably do it soon.
Most of what I found on the web were people who were NOT succeeding and losing their domains to ipower, or last ditch efforts that involve threatening legal action and such. Never found anything that outlined how to actually transfer the domain, so I figured I’d write something up in terms of how to do it. (To be clear, I don’t know if people who let domains go to ipower or who “lost” them actually did so because of bad, unfair business practices on ipower’s part, or their lack of knowledge as to how to transfer the domains.)
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Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
I got my newest computer two years ago. It was difficult to get the larger photo files off the old one as I thought my only option was to burn CDs, and that can go wrong in all sorts of ways. I finally decided to make sure I had all 7gbs (thousands, from what I can tell) of photos off the other day and began the process of burning.
2gbs in and I need to take a break, so I leave the computer running while I’m doing other things. I get what seems to be the new windows blue screen, a kernel dump. Gotten a couple before, everything was fine, seems ok. So I reboot and I get a blinking cursor. I’m not as knowledgeable as I once was about computers, but I know enough to know this is NOT a good thing. 2 more reboots and another blinking cursor. On the 4th I get that it cannot read the hard drive.
At this point, I’ve just about panicked. A friend begins to walk me through a couple of preliminary steps to begin some sort of disc recovery and nothing seems to be working. A few more blinking cursors of death, and then all of a sudden after a few minutes of one, Windows appears. To my shock, it finally boots up. Luckily, I was able to get everything off in spite of being rather stupid about waiting 2 years to do it. I just thought it rather hilarious that it decided to give me this kind of trouble the night I began moving the remainder of things off.
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