Ego! Ego! Ego!: Rantings Archives
October 27, 2009
Rant: Why scales are a tool of BULLSHITI have sworn off weighing myself.
I started dieting young, like a lot of American girls. I was in Weight Watchers in Junior High, where my body clung to every last ounce it could and all I thought about, ever, was eating. Well, eating and grades.
For a while, a couple years ago, I weighed myself every day and entered the data into a spreadsheet which calculated a rolling seven-day average (this allowed me to track my weight loss without being too frustrated by the inevitable knuckleballing one's weight does. Seriously, weigh yourself every day for a week and you'll see what I'm talking about).
I finally decided that my weight is just a number. It doesn't tell me how fit I am. I can't imagine anybody is going to tell a 300-lb professional football player he's unhealthily overweight, or a slim couch potato that he's perfectly healthy. So I swore off the scale. I told the nurses at the doctor's office who insisted on weighing me not to tell me my weight, and turned my back on the scale's numbers. I concentrated on exercising and eating right and didn't let myself worry about what the scale had to say.
Well, I let my personal trainer weigh me as part of his measurement-gathering yesterday. I made the mistake of looking at the weight number. THEN I made the mistake of hitting a BMI calculator today to see where I fall on the BMI charts.
July 09, 2009
Nerdcore is NOT Dead! Nerdcore is LIFE!MC Lars thinks Nerdcore is dead, apparently because some kids posted a stupid video on YouTube.
STOP THE PRESSES!
A genre has practitioners who are lame? It must be DEAD and OVER. Riiiiiight.
I think the problem is that MC Lars sees Nerdcore as defined by "home-produced beats and an awkward flow." That, to me, is NOT Nerdcore. Sure, a lot of Nerdcore has that feel to it, because a lot of practitioners started out that way. MC Frontalot is a freaking Nerdcore GOD and he often has a rather awkward flow.
But that's not what Nerdcore is.
Nerdcore is rapping about nerdy shit. Not the bullshit that comes out of guys like Jay-Z and Kanye (do not get me started on Mr. Anti-Literacy, seriously. Fuck you, Kanye).
Nerdcore guys rap about sci-fi cons and D&D and not fitting in back in high school. Shit I can identify with. They don't rap about how their "bitches" need to "get out the way." If they have a girlfriend, they tend to glorify her ("her name is Schaffer the Doctor, cos she's a Ph.D!" sayeth Schaffer the Darklord of his wife, for example).
Is Nerdcore a subgenre? Yes. Will it ever be mainstream? Probably not. That's fine by me. Nerds aren't mainstream either (except here in beautiful Silicon Valley, woo!). I'm going to keep buying Schaffer's CDs. And MC Lars'. And those of Beefy and the rest too. I'll download their songs. I'll keep pimping them to my friends as good music, because they are.
MC Lars bitching about Nerdcore and saying that he "cringed" when he was called a "nerdcore rapper." disappoints me. Not all of MC Lars' stuff is Nerdcore, true. He's a general, funny rapper first, and happens to do some Nerdcore stuff. But his talking about groundbreaking bands and whining that Nerdcore people should be doing the same thing just strikes me as pretentious.
It sounds to me like MC Lars doesn't just have the wrong idea about what Nerdcore is, but he also has the wrong idea about what it means to be a nerd. Nerds are passionate and do what they love regardless of what mainstream society thinks. Why do nerds have a rep for being unpopular and unfashionable? Because they care more about their passions than about being popular and keeping up with bullshit fashion trends.
I suspect that some fledgeling Nerdcore artists will quit upon reading MC Lars' blog entry, but that's okay. The ones who are passionate about their music will stick around, and those are the ones I care about. The ones who keep Nerdcore alive.
June 22, 2009
My Proposal: That I Stop Watching Stupid Romantic ComediesI should have known better.
When I boiled down my movie-reviewing options to "The Proposal" and "Year One" for the weekend, I should've gone to see "Year One." Sure, it looks like one of Jack Black's bad movies (his movies are, in my experience, either freaking awesome or freaking horrible. There is no middle ground.) but romantic comedies almost invariably grab my feminist chain and yank it, hard.
"The Proposal" was no exception.
File under: Feminism, Movies, Rantings
Posted at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)November 21, 2008
Twilight"Hey, Ealasaid, are you gonna see Twilight"
I used to answer this with things like, "I'd rather take my eyes out with a spork" but now I'm thinking it might be worth going for the LULZ. The books are so despicably horrifyingly bad that I feel vaguely nauseated by them just from the beta-radiation I've gotten (Edward, the "perfect boyfriend" is abusive and dismissive, Bella is a spoiled idiot, etc.). But apparently the guy playing Edward in the movie hates the books. So that could be entertaining.
Anyway. If you have somehow missed the trunkloads of rantings others have done on why these books are so terrible, here's what I've been reading lately:
Misogyny in the books (and really, there's so much win in the comments to that post, I'm slowly working my way through all of them)
A rant on the beginning of the last book
Hilarious summary of the story, by an ex-Mormon (in case you didn't know, the author of the books is a devout Mormon, and apparently it kind of shows)
Another summary, with fewer pictures
A Nausea That Borders on Violence: Why Twilight is a Cancerous Sore on the Face of LiteratureAnd, as I tweeted recently: Best description of "Twilight" EVER: "It's like what I was scribbling in my notebook in the back of math class in 9th grade."
And finally, this piece of fanart cracked me right up.
October 28, 2008
Rant: Abortion as a state's rights issueSo I was listening to an episode of Speaking of Faith recently, where a conservative was discussing religion and politics (it was a sequel to an episode with a liberal doing the same thing), and the guy was all on about being pro-forced-birth (or "pro-life" as he put it) and saying abortion should be regulated by the states.
I'm used to hearing that, but this time it made me do a double-take.
I mean, let me get this straight. This guy thinks that abortion is murder, but thinks that states should be able to decide if they punish it or not.
File under: Feminism, Political Schtuff, Rantings
Posted at 07:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)March 27, 2007
The Secret: What a scam.In the last two days, I have read two articles on The Secret. The articles are:
I highly recommend reading both articles, but what they boil down to is this: The Secret is no secret at all; it is an insultingly simpleminded interpretation of the Law of Attraction. Basically, it posits that all the bad things in your life are your own fault (wow, so all those Jews made the Holocaust happen? Everyone who has died of AIDS willed themselves to get it? It's the Africans' own fault slavery happened?), including weight gain (apparently food doesn't cause weight gain, thinking fat thoughts does) and poverty. I am disappointed but not shocked that Oprah is espousing this tripe - as a black woman who has pulled herself up by her own bootstraps she should be ashamed. I'm not shocked because Oprah is all about feel-good populist stuff, and this is nothing if not feel-good and populist. Apparently the book claims that you can make your life everything you want just by wishing it to be so - you don't have to work for it or anything! Just tell the universe you want it!
Good grief. What bullshit.
Sure, our thoughts shape our realities, but only to a certain extent, and claiming otherwise makes you a selfish bastard. Oh, I don't need to feel bad for or help out people in need - it's their own damn fault they're poor/hungry/homeless/whatever. AIDS? That would disappear if all those poor morons would just believe they won't catch it. Why should I fund research into a cure? Ditto cancer, STDs, and other dangerous things.
Come on. If believing you won't catch something really worked, no ignorant teenager would get an STD or pregnant, and all those guys in Africa who think having sex with an infant will cure their HIV would be cured.
This kind of thing makes me want to beat my head against a wall. Willful ignorance is the one thing I loathe most about humankind.
January 24, 2007
ARGH!I AM AGGRAVATED!
File under: Fibromyalgia, Pure Ego!, Rantings
Posted at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)June 15, 2006
Childfree VentingOK, if you're easily offended by childfree rantings, steer clear. If you want to hear what has pissed me off this time, read on.
March 09, 2006
ARGHI am a feminist. I like reading feminist blogs. But sometimes they really irk me, like when feminists rant about and condemn practices they clearly do not understand. Take the comments to this post at I Blame the Patriarchy. These feminists mean well but they grossly oversimplify and then harsh on a whole spectrum of sexual practice they clearly have absolutely no experience with.
ARGH! I hate that any time I say I am a feminist, I get lumped in with folk like that.
On the bright side, they probably hate being lumped in with me too, so that's something.
March 01, 2006
AUGHI have entirely too much on my plate. Aside from work (which is awesome but stressful 'cos I'm new and trying to get up to speed), I have the following to deal with:
- The wedding of one of my oldest friends - I'm Maid of Honor
- getting ready for my Aikido test, which I swear is getting harder instead of easier
- Cover Cinequest
- Handle arrangements with the gal who covers my shifts feeding the family horses
- Handle getting my two remaining web clients moved to new servers
- handle getting my car fixed
- drive to Davis this weekend for wedding stuff
- Various other good-but-still-stressful stuff
I am LOSING MY MIND OMG.So if you're wondering why I've been quiet here and not talkative on IM, that's why. My brain is about to melt and run out my ears.
June 27, 2005
An open letter to Sprint PCSAs promised, here's my letter to Sprint PCS. I am aware that sending it may not do any good, but one can always hope. Regardless, I'm leaving Sprint and I encourage all y'all to do the same. I know that any large tech company will have issues, but the treatment and lack of service I've received from Sprint is quite frankly beyond the pale. I have never been so frustrated and angry with a company before. At the end of my last interaction with a Sprint employee, I was literally shaking with fury and was, in fact, so frustrated that I actually burst into tears upon leaving the store.
Those of you who know me IRL will doubtless be aware of just how incredibly angry I have to be to react like that. Sure, I get mad. I have a bit of a temper. But this... this is too much. Way too much.
I am now a Cingular customer, so if anybody wants to take advantage of that unlimited mobile-to-mobile talking feature, feel free to join me.
April 29, 2005
ARGH!Today I deleted a legit comment by accident. It got mixed in with the spam I was batch-deleting during lunch.
That's it.
I will have some free time here before I leave to go home but after I'm off the clock. I am going to install SpamLookup.
Ted: I'm sorry. I dug your comment, it was funny and made me grin. I even approved it - it was officially on the site for like... um... three minutes. If you want to repost it, that would be cool.
April 24, 2005
Argh.I have 188 messages in my inbox. 69 of them are unread.
And that's just my primary inbox. We won't discuss how many messages, read or unread, are in my Lists folders. Even the lists I moderate aren't getting paid enough attention to.
I may have to download a mail client to check my ealasaid.com email at work out of self-defence. Argh! 'cos seriously, this "out of the house at 8am, home between 9 and 10 pm" thing is really killing my email habits. Gah.
April 05, 2005
A Friendly TipWhen attempting to get random people from the internet to do your homework, emailing them something like the following is a bad idea.
January 20, 2005
Dogs are fine. It's their owners that piss me off.Now, don't get me wrong. I kind of like dogs. And I know several dog owners who are rational and cool people.
But some jackass in our neighborhood keeps letting his dog poop in our yard and I have about had it. Seriously. I came home after a long, lousy day and just wanted to put my feet up. Instead, I got to spend 15 minutes cleaning dog crap off my shoe and off the carpet because I neglected to check my shoes for crap after running out to my car to grab my phone (which I'd left behind by accident).
I remembered to check my shoes for crap the first time but not the second, so I had to clean up where I'd tracked fragrant dog crap all over our carpet and the floor of my bedroom.
I am so angry right now I am nearly seeing red.
There has to be a way to get these dogs to quit pooping on our yard. I don't really hold it against the dogs - dogs poop on walks. They do. It's natural. But if their owners aren't going to clean up after them, I want these dogs to poop somewhere else.
Suggestions? Short of hiding with a pressure hose and spraying every dog who comes near our yard, I mean.
March 23, 2004
yeeshI just want to echo Bookslut and say, "Fuck Daphne de Marneffe and her new book Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life." (original entry here and explanation here)
Warning: hugeass rant below. Reading Bookslut's post sort of reminded me about how much this topic pisses me off.
March 21, 2004
I hate people.Last night some asshat keyed my car.
My new car.
My beautiful 2003 Civic.
They made a big scratch across the back, right above the licenseplate holding area.
February 10, 2004
I figured it out!I've figured it out.
Stupid people are ruining the 'net for the rest of us.
Now, hear me out before you decide that I'm an elitist snob who deserves to die a flaming death.
June 26, 2003
Summer is here?! Noooo!Dood. I hate summer. I really do. It's bright and hot and it makes me cranky. Sure, it's nice to not be freezing to death (I'm cold blooded enough that solitary winter nights can really be unpleasant) but I loathe sweating.
And now, to add insult to injury: I am working 35+ hours a week at the learning center, which has no AC.
It's going to be a long summer.
May 06, 2003
AOL Kills PuppiesNo, really.
They did.
Indirectly, but yeah. Read all about it. Bastards.
One more reason to hate AOL.
April 01, 2003
TANJARGH! Dood! Poor Antwon had his domain name stolen from him by a frickin' tiddlywinks organization?! Truly, there ain't no justice!!!
March 27, 2003
Yeargh!Man!
So I've been wondering lately why I'm so blasted tired and spazzed out all the time the last few days. I figured it out.
Doods, if you count all my contracts separately, I have nine jobs!!! Check it out:
- Senior Teacher at Success! Learning Center
- Junior sysadmin at Success! Learning Center (which has been a frickin' part-time job in its own right the last week or two)
- Private tutor (with two batches of students)
- Web contract with Milpitas Unified School District
- Web contract with the Milpitas Rotary
- Web contract with another Milpitas group (not finalized, but still requiring time and effort, naturally)
- Film reviewer for the Milpitas Post
- Painting signs for my parents' church
- Substitute teacher
Add to that the various other projects I have (my web site, The Red Pages, etc) and it's no wonder that I'm frazzled beyond belief and haven't seen most of my friends in ages. *sigh*
March 13, 2003
I still hate computers. Sometimes.AARGH!
So, as i mentioned, I'm trying to install Norton Antivirus 2003 on the computers up at the learning center. And I've had a bunch of trouble with one system, which today necessitated calling Symantec Tech Support.
March 11, 2003
Where do you want to go today?I know where I want to go today!
To a place where programs just install and don't require me to install soul-sucking programs spawned in the lowest circles of hell first.
Yes, I'm still trying to get Norton AntiVirus 2003 installed on one of our systems here at the learning center. I think that when I uninstalled IE the first time, I may have botched something. Rrgh. Crap. Etc.
I keep reminding myself that this is a Valuable Learning Experience(tm) and that it will be Good For Me (tm).
But I'm still pissed.
March 06, 2003
You... disappoint me, Mr. Norton...Did anybody else know you have to have Micro$oft's Internet Exploiter 5.0+ installed to put the new Norton Antivirus on your system? I am not amused.
Now I have to wait while ALL FOUR computers at my Mom's learning center download IE6 so I can install Norton AV 2003 on them. I just looove being the junior sysadmin for this place.
February 14, 2003
V-DayThis is my post about Valentine's day. Watch in admiration, dear readers, as I avoid ranting about how the raw materialism of the holiday grates on my feminist sensibitities. Sigh in relief as I refrain from posting terrifyingly sappy drivel about the object of my affections in an attempt to keep your blood sugar levels in a healthy range and my dignity somewhat intact.
Well, crap, that doesn't leave me much to write about, does it?
Ah, well. Happy Valentine's Day, all!
February 13, 2003
You've got to be kiddingAnti-spam software provider spams potential clients.
Good grief. What morons.
February 11, 2003
Things that make me go "aaagh!"1.
Which OS are You?
Dood! I use Windows98, that doesn't mean I am it. I gotta get hooked up with Linux.2. This unnerving artcle about our prez. This guy thinks the reason Bush isn't making so many verbal gaffes in his speaches is that he's talking about retribution and violence, and those are topics he's comfortable with... rather than the ones he was botching: compassion, democracy, empathizing with the common man. I can see where the writer is coming from, and although I'm not entirely sure I think he's right, it's an interesting idea.
3. This article on states that want to let people have license plates with "Choose life" under their plate numbers. My take: fine, but you damn well better have "Pro-choice" license plates as well. The ACLU will no doubt be laying the smack down. I hope.
February 08, 2003
EducationMan.
This article boggles my mind. Go read and come back to read my comments, ok? Clicking on links is good exercise.
Dude, this "working full time" thing really sucks.So for the last five or however many years, when I filed my taxes, I got a pretty hefty return. This was mostly because my witholding has always been set to the regular rate but until recently I didn't actually work all that much except during the summer (college being what it is).
Well.
In 2002, I worked my heinie off pretty much full time all year. I did my taxes last night and discovered that my refund from the feds is just enough to cover all but about two dollars of the money I owe the state.
How lame is that? *sigh*
February 04, 2003
Grrrrrrrr!Some of my handful of faithful readers may have noticed that I have a bit of a ... thing about the separation of church and state. That is to say, mixing religion and politics really pisses me off.
Well, our beloved President has given me another reason to be pissed that the Supreme Court elected him.
January 27, 2003
Rant Ho!So GeekyChick linked to this disclaimer for blogs. I read it.
And thought for a bit.
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