El Goonish Shive

Oh great, I still have three more- *Sees February rapidly approaching* 2 more years left

Oh great. I'm doomed and there's nothing I can do about it. Accursed teenhood. Accursed Aspergers. Accursed me.

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I look back on my high school years and I see missed opportunities, but how is that different from any other part of my life? I take great pleasure in the sheer randomness of life; there really is no way that you can look back on your life and say, "Yes, if I had made that decision, I would have been better off". Sure, you can lament that you didn't take that opportunity to learn to woodwork from your grandfather before he passed, but maybe that would have resulted in a tragic jigsaw accident. Maybe, if you'd turned your application in earlier at the college you really wanted to go to, you would have gotten in and that would have resulted in dying when a bus hit you. You really can't know, so you can always assume that this could be the best of all possible worlds and all you can do is do your best from here.

One thing I do wish I could kick into my younger self was that, just because you didn't make the effort to get to know people doesn't mean that you were an outcast that no one liked. Much to my surprise, my Senior year I learned that almost everyone in my class knew who I was and thought I was a great guy. A bit odd, but a great guy. Heck, I learned there were several girls who would have gone out with me if I'd just have asked. But no... I had to assume that I was an outcast, seen as unclean... :-P

I mean aspergers isn't exactly an anti-relationship thing. My first long term relationship was with a guy with aspergers, and girls have aspergers too ya know.

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No, it's an anti-people thing. It's more things that are wrong with me that makes everything so bloody easy for everyone else a nightmare for me.

That mindset baffles me.

. You know, that exact same ting happened to me? Shame it didn't matter anymore because you know, graduation and moving on.

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It's not actually that easy for other people. It just looks that way because they've practiced so much.

Talking to people is a skill. If you don't hone it, you never get good at it, but once you've mastered it, you can do amazing things without ever even looking like you're trying.

edited 23rd Jan '15 11:43:42 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Personally, I came out of my shell (relatively speaking, I'm still rather introverted) mostly by accident. A shitty friend led me to get closer to the people that would turn out to be my lifelong friends. It wasn't easy, but it was very much worth it.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

I joined a club, so there was a common interest uniting us. That's what really got me socializing.

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I stuck to some funny guys like a barnacle in year 10, and now we're best bros forever.

...Seriously, I think I gave them Stockholm syndrome or something. They didn't like me initially, but now one of them is my best friend.

Come sail your ships around me, and burn your bridges down.

I ran clubs back in high school, that helped. But shifting environments and decreased opportunities has not helped things. Every movement from a job or school decreases consistency and means having to start all over again with everything. And This Job Corps center is not exactly a place where "clubs" happen. I most certainly have friends here, but sticking to the pattern that is my life they're all guys and since I'm almost finished I'll be moving on to the advanced training in about a month or two.

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A thing I'm trying to apply more in social situations is to think less of how I can come across as interesting and likeable, but to find the interesting and likeable qualities of the other person. Ask loads of questions- let them be the one to show who they are (respecting their privacy and personal space, of course). If you're polite and take an interest in who they are as a person, you're pretty much safe from being a narcissist or a jackass. And if they're the one asking the questions, just go with it and answer honestly, but remember to throw a few q's back every now and then.

I actually think being caught up in your own head is the biggest barrier to forming relationships, because, even if you're not a narcissist- even if you're the exact opposite- you ultimately end up caring more about yourself than the other person, and it shows.

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Rich's feminism rant part 2: This time it's Bishonen

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The comic's nothing special, but the rant is surprisingly mature. Respect for Shive.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

I really like Dan's rant.

Plus, how he handles stupid messages is great.

Come sail your ships around me, and burn your bridges down.

It's about time he apologized to those of us named Richard. #NotallRichards

Not that there are many of us left... and heck, I usually prefer "Rick" for a reason (several, which I bet plenty of folks can deduce on their own). But still.

Also, for his rant, Shivers is right about no angel comes forth and declares one a musician. It's a title wrested from a demon of some variety, which one beats in a duel. Despite what you might think, it doesn't necessarily have to be a fiddling duel.

Of course, the changing of the wording does change the context quite a bit. The rant that Rich gave came off as "I don't agree with this woman; therefore, I'm calling her a 'man-hating feminist'." While this may have been an apt description of Susan in her first appearance, it definitely doesn't fit now. In fact, while Susan is still most likely identifying as a feminist, she hasn't been shown identifying herself in front of others as one in ages, and all indications we've seen on-screen are that she doesn't participate in feminist critique of media. Thus, Rich came off as stupid and ignorant.

Things are much different in the case of Richard. There, he's specifically saying that Susan has identified as a feminist. That's fine; even if it's never shown on-screen, we have had enough indications to reasonably conclude that Susan has, in fact, done so on the show. In this case, Richard is not stupid. However, with that said, Susan still hasn't ever been shown to engage in feminist critique; therefore, complaining about that is still extremely ignorant.

Venturing out a little further, I'm also going to assume that Susan probably won't ever go into feminist critique of media. For one, it's a pretty complex subject, and it's really easy to screw up (not as easy as socialist critique, but that starts going into my opinions of different critical schools, and so completely Off the Rails that you could see EGS from orbit). For another, we'd actually be relying on Dan's grasp of the concept for Susan to relate - while I certainly suspect he's sympathetic to the concept, I bet he wouldn't have confidence enough to write such a thing. Finally, all things told, I think Susan wouldn't necessarily want to. She seems much more comfortable offering geek critiques and playing off of Elliot's reactions.

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

I dunno - she cared enough about the uniform policy to directly challenge it, both verbally and physically. And this is after she got some character development and became a fleshed-out character, not just "that feminist character who's kinda wrong about stuff lol". She's been written as someone who's fairly vocal about her views regarding women - like she won't cram it into everything, like someone writing a Straw Feminist, but it comes up.

I think - personally - that if a movie or show is backwards enough, she'd rip into that and call it out as garbage. Like if a movie had a protagonist charmer who's never portrayed in a negative light, who slaps a flight stewardess' ass and calls her sweet-cheeks in a "haha what a card" sort of light, she'd go out of her way to say how trashy that is. Which is the sort of move, justified or not, which would attract a Rich-type commenter - if my ongoing study of Cracked users replying to progressive articles is any indication.

...Seriously, you write an article about rape victims, and you get "dumb b**** shoulda said she was lesbian" because she mentions dating a woman after getting over her trauma. Justified points or not, anything that's used as a stereotype about feminists (lesbian, butch, talks incessantly about women getting fucked over) gets written off as "feminist garbage".

edited 26th Jan '15 7:26:28 AM by MrMallard

Come sail your ships around me, and burn your bridges down.

I want to agree with Shive's rant on paper, but in practice, I've often had the exact same arguments about feminist principles like victim-blaming with egalitarians and the like - people who claim to be about equality for everyone and oppose feminism for being just about women - that I've had with MRAs. My experience for "Equality for EVERYONE" labels has been that they're often used to oppose civil rights; the idea being that those fighting for those rights are ignorant to the harm they'd cause to another group, or that those folks have benefits that outweigh their losses, or some other such rationale.

It's this flaw◊, basically. There is a valid point to be made in that the uplifting of one group inherently harms another group, but that harm is a side effect of privilege being lost. When everyone has a fair share of the pie, those accustomed to having more pie have to make peace with their smaller slices. When women gained the right to vote, every man's vote became worth half as much. When marital rape was outlawed, every married man lost his guarantee of sex whenever he desired it. Every woman who is accepted into the workforce increases competition for men looking for jobs. All of these examples are ways men, as a whole, have lost privileges by the advancement of women's rights, but those losses are necessary; they should never have been privileges in the first place.

That's why I'm a feminist; because my experience has been that egalitarianism is looking at the Emancipation Proclamation and going, "Why is nobody thinking of the white land owners and how they will be affected by this? They've lost a substantial amount of workforce. I believe the freed blacks owe those men reparations."

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That assumes that the only problems for men that egalitarians are concerned about are the ones brought on by their loss of privilege, as opposed to the ones they already have.

edited 26th Jan '15 7:58:56 AM by Ninety

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

And in that regard, I've seen feminists do a better job fighting for legitimate men's rights than either MRAs or egalitarians too.

Like, while the latter is busy trying to keep women out of the Boys' Club of military service, feminists fought to abolish the draft to eliminate the other side of the "Man MUST serve, Women CANNOT serve" equation.

edited 26th Jan '15 7:55:44 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

To me, that's what egalitarianism really is. The others appropriated the label and are defiling it just by calling themselves such.

This means today, if you actually act towards equality, you're labeled a feminist. This is how bad the situation is.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

That diagram demonstrates that it is equality we need though. There's no intrinsic disadvantage to being female or black or whatever. White males just need to get off our stack of boxes.

edited 26th Jan '15 7:58:22 AM by Elfive

Shrug. I can't argue against anecdotal evidence, I'm just speaking conceptually.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

@19015 Oh, I'm not saying that Susan isn't a feminist, or wouldn't identify as one. I specifically meant that one could only call her a man-hating feminist, in Rich's words, at the beginning. She hasn't hated the male gender in quite some time.

Though my point about feminist critique of media still stands. She's never gone into that.

Now, in the case of something that was completely retrograde in how it handled female characters, I could conceivably see Susan engaging in some discussion of that. Two caveats to that, though.

1. One does not have to go into feminist critique to discuss such matters. Feminist critique does not have a monopoly on complaining about poorly written female characters.
2. Susan's never been shown engaging in feminist critique of any variety. One can be a feminist and a critic without engaging in feminist critique - in fact, all indications are that Susan does exactly that.

Of course, that all leads into my larger point. Namely, most people don't actually understand feminism as a school of thought. They have, at best, an understanding of the Theme Park Version of feminism, and many people like Rich make themselves look even more stupid because they run their mouth off about a topic that they don't understand, to the extent that they don't even know what actually is or is not a part of that topic. It's not whether or not Susan would be willing to engage in the topic. It's the fact that she hasn't, and Rich is extra stupid (beyond his usual, I mean) because he doesn't recognize it.

I mean, I know Rich is a strawman, but he's not a particularly outrageous one. Though regarding such a matter, Poe's Law definitely comes into play - I'm not sure that Shive could effectively construct an outrageous strawman that goes beyond what the actual people advocating such viewpoints would suggest. In fact, Shive could reveal that he just takes real comments from people like Rich and stick them in his comics, and I don't think anyone would be surprised.

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

Just because we haven't seen Susan engage in feminist critiques on the movie review show doesn't mean she hasn't. We've seen very little of their show in general, and most of what we were shown was actually used to show the chemistry between Susan and Elliott. It seems reasonable to me to believe that she probably does throw some feminist stuff into her reviews - it's an issue she's passionate about, after all.

Or it may just be something she only does once in a while, when she's particularly annoyed at something in a movie. It's possible the video Rich was responding to was the only one where she's ever done it. What matters, for the strip, is that she has at least one video where she gets into some degree of feminist critique.

The sad thing about Rich, in that strip, is that he's actually remarkably accurate a representation of teenage guys who reject feminism. The language he's using actually does remind me a bit of how I would talk when I argued with conservatives. He'll either grow out of it and use more moderate language, or he'll have a long life of arguing on political blogs about how whichever party he disagrees with is total scum.

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I'm sure Susan would go into feminist critique if she felt like the movie was doing a bad job of it. I think she'd probably talk about Stuffed in the Fridge now and then.

Oh God! Natural light!

More OT3 shenanigans.

I remember saying ages ago that by the end of the comic, I hoped Tedd and Grace would get married. That's still a thing I'd like to see, because I'm just a sucker for that sort of thing plain and simple, but now there's Sarah to consider if all three of them become canon to whatever degree.

Also - the strip number in the URL is 2015. Therefore this strip accurately sums up this year as a whole somehow.

edited 27th Jan '15 1:42:42 AM by MrMallard

Come sail your ships around me, and burn your bridges down.