The Definition of Music Fan

When can you call yourself a fan of a certain band or artist? How much of their music need you have heard before it crosses from "I like these songs" to "I like this band", you think?

An Argument For Eugenics

I woke up this morning to a little informational video about introversion and extroversion. It had a few things to say about these two ends of a rather complex spectrum, but the bottom line - the idea behind the video - was that modern society is being pretty mean to introverts. Our society values traits like aggression, risk-taking, boldness, and social interaction very highly over traits like contemplation, focus and a careful nature.
I have personally found this to be true. I am far more proud of the outgoing aspects of my nature than the more abundant introspective traits. It isn't strange that it should be so. Modern society is highly based on social interaction and communication - the ability to form casual contacts is very important, and high social mobility means we must constantly adapt to new kinds of society. It is no accident that the hero of our times is the con-man, the pick up artist, the audacious social explorer.
The video I saw said that, as extroversion or introversion are part of our genes, to discriminate based on these traits it is equal to racism and sexism, and here is where I found myself disagreeing. There is a fallacious logic in racism or sexism that does not seem to apply here; race or sex is not inherently tied to behaviour. Introversion is, by its very definition. And so, perhaps, it may be argued that introversion is doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs; it is an outlived phase of human evolution. At best, it is a disability to be cured.
Should we "cure" people of contemplation, focus, and a quiet nature? Why not? The traits are far less useful than the ability to interact openly. This applies, seemingly, in all strata of society.
So here it is, then, an argument for eugenics. Introverts, including myself, are rapidly becoming fossils, remarkably out of place in the Facebook age. Evolution has a way of handling things on its own, of course - so there is no need to actually remove people from the gene pool - but when a behaviour is harmful, we also have no reason to interfere when it naturally diminishes or dies out.
Then this is the argument, distilled to its cold, Darwinian core:
Introverted people are disappearing. Let them.

On Having A Cat

I have now been living with a cat for 36 hours. Here are some initial thoughts on what it's like to live with a cat.

Firstly, somehow I felt it made the apartment a bit cramped. Which is weird, because, y'know, it's a cat - it's not that big. But its presence feels bigger than its physical body. At the same time, I don't quite regard it as a person. When I'm alone with the cat, I'm not quite by myself but I also don't have company. It's unsettling. It's like there's a ghost in the room.

Second, cats smell. I don't like the smell, and it seems to stick to textiles, which unnerves me. I'm a bit freaked out to touch anything which smells like cat, even though I'm not that freaked out to touch the cat itself, which makes absolutely no sense.

Third, it's kind of adorably dumb. That part I like. Despite how I suck at reading the body languages of animals, cats aren't terribly complicated. They mostly care about food and sleep. Interacting with a cat puts me a bit in the same mindset, which is somehow kinda soothing. I guess that's one reason why people have cats. They're not very judgmental because they have absolutely zero ambitions themselves.

Fourth, it has an impact on the people I live with. They get a lot more shouty. The cat does things it's not allowed to do, and then they shout at it. It's really weird. I'm not used to shouting. It's a good thing I'm not taking care of the cat myself, because I don't think I would be very good at shouting at it, and apparently that's important.

These are just the first few reflections I've made. Maybe I'll change my mind regarding some of them, or all of them. Maybe there'll be other things I haven't considered. So far it's very strange though.

Ray Bradbury is dead

So, at long last, Ray Bradbury has died. He's one of my all-time favorite authors, so I thought it warranted a mention here. I think it's spectacular and fascinating that he has lived up until now; this is a man who started his career writing about Martians. He was eighteen when the radio drama War of the Worlds was broadcast. He saw the rise and fall of the US Space Program. Many others live long lives, of course, but this man wrote science fiction - and I find something beautiful in that. He lived his life trying to see into the future, and he lived long enough to see where he was wrong, and where he was right, more than three-quarters a century worth of future. Rest in peace, Mr. Bradbury.

Boy Vision

Okay, so this post is a thought sprung from three entirely unrelated things I've read and heard about. They are:

1. The Mantis Shrimp, which can see colors which we can't see.
2. What D remarked a while ago at a party about how culture is integral and cannot be changed once it is set.
3. A forum thread about sexism I recently read.

Now, to actually explain what these have in common will take some work, so bear with me here. I'll try to start with explaining the relevant points in number 3. See, this woman - Devilfish - was remarking that what bothers her with sexism isn't so much the big things, because nobody is advocating the big things. As in, nobody (at least, nobody serious) is arguing that women shouldn't be allowed same pay for the same jobs, for example.

What bothered her was, instead, all the tiny things. People making fun of women without make-up. Wolf whistles while eating popsicles. Being appreciated not for her skills but for her looks. Many small things. The exact phrase she used was "death by a thousand cuts", because taken by themselves, they're small and trivial and can be brushed off, but they aggregate into becoming very frustrating over time. Now, I started thinking - how come I haven't noticed all those small things? It seems to be that small "cuts" of sexism occur towards women very often, yet it's rarely that I - or other men, for that matter - seem to register them. It's hard to understand what living under such a torrent of tiny annoying things might entail.

That brought me into thinking about point number 2. We can't say much for certain about the biological differences between behavior in men and women, but whether there are biological differences or not, men and women are raised as part of slightly different cultures, or at least, are raised to understand their roles in that culture differently. This sort of thing is ingrained in us from a very young age. And that leads me to point number one, the mantis shrimp. The mantis shrimp has 16 different photoreceptor pigments; humans have only three. What this means is that the mantis shrimp can see 32 colors whereas humans can only see 6; every other color we see is just mixture of black, white, red, green, blue, and yellow.

So the mantis shrimp can see colors that we, as humans, cannot understand because we are biologically different. Then it stands to reason that perhaps, I can't perceive some things that women perceive because I am culturally different; because I have been raised to focus my attention elsewhere. It might be that some such things are simply impossible for me to understand, and because I already have my formative years behind me, they will always be impossible for me to understand; even if I were zapped by a gender-transformation gun and lived the next 50 years as a woman, and tried my damnedest to adapt to that, I would still retain the way that I was raised, and old habits die hard.

I don't know if I had a point with this, exactly, but I found the thought that we are "brainwashed" not only into a set of behaviors, but also into a certain perception very interesting. When a woman hears a comment about her body, it can be argued that - because she's been raised to think about her appearance in a whole other way than I have - she hears that comment in a different way than what I do, and I will never be able to hear some of the "shades" of that comment. I can tell whether it's a light or a dark color - a positive or negative comment - but I sometimes can't tell whether it's tinted in the unpleasant tones of "You are a sex object" or not, unless those tones are unusually stark. At least that's what I imagine.

This might be absolute hogwash, I don't know. Maybe people aren't all that different, even if society does its damnedest to try and make us different; still, the theory of radically different perceptions would explain why some men can't seem to understand that they're being sexist even when a lot of women insist they are.

Miss Optimus Prime

The last post being on the subject of heroic self-sacrifice, I think the transition into talking about Optimus Prime is seamless, here.

I realized the other day while watching Transformers 3 two things: One, the Transformers movies are kind of a lot sexist. As in, kind of a lot actually - particularly the third movie, whose two only female characters delivered an incredibly blunt message: Eye candy girlfriend is useless except as eye candy, also women in charge are terrible and need to get sexed up - preferably by the worthless comedy relief character, because, y'know. Women.

The other thing I realized, however, was a more profound insight. There's something I've always found kinda cool about the Transformers: They're a sexless species. They don't have genders. In fact, their reproduction works in an entirely different way from most species on Earth. We refer to most of the Transformers as male, because... well to be honest, kinda just because men are the default sex in our culture. I thought that perhaps it's because most of the Transformers look male, but actually... not really. They look so different from humans that there's no real way of telling what sex they would be if they had them. Yes, the voice actors in the cartoon are men, but I read the comics so the cartoon voices aren't really "canon" to me - and besides, female bears don't exactly sound anything like female humans, but they're still she-bears.

And then it struck me: Not that human terms really apply to the Transformers, but if we desperately wanted to assign them sexes... wouldn't it make the most sense to refer to Optimus as a woman? After all, Optimus Prime has the Creation Matrix - Optimus is the one who creates new life. The creation of life has, on Earth, in most cultures, been viewed as pretty much the definition of being female.

Optimus Prime is really only set apart from the other Transformers because she can give birth. She is also the one who nurtures, teaches and heals the other Transformers using the Matrix. It marks whoever bears it as a leader, but are we going to call Optimus Prime a man simply because she's in charge?

Optimus Prime is, of course, neither man nor woman because the terms don't apply to Transformers. But if we're going to go with one of them... wouldn't woman be the most logical choice, given the biological functions of Earth females?

Easter Sunday

Today is a peculiar day. It's a day whose religious implications pass by us almost unnoticed: Even if we're aware of what the holiday celebrates, I don't think we stop to reflect on what it really means.

Today is Easter Sunday, the day when Jesus conquered Death. By now, it's a story that's been re-told, re-imagined, re-arranged so many times that we hardly even think about what it's trying to say. This story is getting old. It's getting too old for us. It doesn't seem to mean very much, not anymore, not to us. But we're not the people whom this story is for. We're not the target audience.

The story of Easter was meant for people to whom Death is not a distant threat, not someone who waits at the threshold of old age, not a snarky skeleton with a scythe or a woman in black robes. The story of Easter was written for those to whom Death is an enemy; for those who live in constant fear of plague and famine and bullets. Because death may be a natural thing, and it may be something that we can accept and talk about and understand, but ultimately, it is destructive. Death ends things. We can wax poetical about it, but at the end of the day, death hurts – not so much its victims as it hurts those who are left behind. But we can't hope to understand this. I don't understand it. I have never seen the ugly face of death up close – the random, pointless, indiscriminately cruel face of death – and I pray I never will.

The story of Easter is written for those who have seen that face. It is written for those who have seen people crucified by the Romans, slaughtered in the World Wars, burned by napalm, taken by the Black Plague. Those people are not us.

But if there's one thing we should take away from the story of Easter, it's that those people are still out there, and to them, this story is still meaningful. It doesn't matter that Jesus came back; that's not the important part. What matters is that things got better, that things will get better.

And so, the true meaning of the story is this: If we work hard, if we live our lives with grace and virtue and compassion, then there may come a day when nobody needs to hear it.