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shadesofmauve:

shadesofmauve:

shadesofmauve:

I decided to give Parks and Rec a try while I clean my room.

This is not entertaining this is a normal day at work.

Okay, never-mind, clearly this is set in an alternate un-reality. Public employees are allowed to canvas? That’s a bizarre alien world.

Okay, seriously — pilots are often a little ragged, so can anyone tell me: do future episodes have more of other characters and less of Leslie Knope being a painfully incompetent ass, or should I switch to Hulu and try Community instead?

So the recommendation from NPR (source of all information) was to start with the last episode of Season 1 and move on to Season 2. Personally I’d even just start with Season 2. I never made it through Season 1 – mostly because of Leslie Knope’s ineptness, but she becomes way more competent in Season 2.

So, it’s no secret that I adore my little Moskva watch. 1950’s tech that keeps accurate enough time for me, and doesn’t use any batteries; which given the infrequency of my use of it, it’s nice to not be using batteries because my old watches I’d pull them out and they’d invariably be dead.

I’d had a different-but-related problem with my nurse’s watches. They always died at inopportune moments. I’d wear one for ages, it’d die, then it’d take me months to get a new battery (because my own department has clocks everywhere, and on the ultra rare occasions I need one where there isn’t a clock, my phone has a timer on it).

So I decided to see if I could pick up a mechanical nurses’s watch, except.. it turns out that they’re not that common anymore. I imagine no-one wants to pay for the sort of cost that an actual mechanical watch costs. Eventually I found one on e-bay which was inscribed, but otherwise a nice example.

My cunning plan, such as it was, was to steal the strap that’s on the watch I bought when I got a job as a healthcare assistant. Unfortunately, it’s gone walkies and I can’t work out where it is*. Second plan: get a cheap-ass watch, steal the pendantyfobbystrappy bit from it and replace the one on the watch I’d just bought. Clever, non?

Non. It turned out the cheap-ass watch had a interference fit pin holding the strap on, rather a proper watch strap spring thingie (who’s name escapes me).

So then I broke out my dad’s pin-vice and a miniature drill (thankfully there was an unbroken one in there, my dad often bought multiples because he, and I, would frequently break them).

Which kinda made me feel nostalgic.

Thankfully, the new strap is made of cheesemetal, or something similar… As you’d expect from a watch that was as dreadfully cheap as the one that I’d bought. But, pin-vice and drilling and a new pin and lo I have a non-inscribed watch that keeps good time and should, with luck, last me as long as I continue to nurse***.

*Probably it’s absconded on some drinking binge with the nut-runners I spent half of today looking for**.
** That may be a slight exaggeration.
*** Unless I put it through the laundry.

Much progress today, thanks largely to the arrival of the new and vastly superior Makita LiIon Drill/Screwdriver. It’s so vastly superior to the ‘Challenge’ piece of cack that I’ve been using that it’s quite, quite astonishing. Although, that said, the Challenge one does seem to have higher torque available in ‘screw’ mode than the Makita.

Anyhow, with the help of my best beloved and after much trimming of crappy bits of timber (because I was somewhat short) – I managed to get the back piece completed. The whole boxy bit of it is now screwed together with thirty billion screws.

It’s even more or less square. It’s not perfect, but then I wasn’t going for perfect, especially since I’ve loaned out my chop saw and thus cutting lots of bits of wood to the same size is actually quite difficult. Anyhow, it’s pleasingly together and now the next exciting task is to make the top window bit. For which I need… more pallets.

Kathryn’s repotted the plants, so they’re getting ready to make their way out there…

And in other news I’ve (finally) got around to adding:

<meta http-equiv=”X-Clacks-Overhead” content=”GNU Terry Pratchett” />

To the page code :)

vashtijoy:

poppypicklesticks:

teenage feminist: Look tumblr!  I literally went to the drug store and look at what I just found: here are two razors made by a grand total of one company: from the men’s section and the women’s section!

tumblr: gasp!

teenage feminist: AND THE MAN’S PRODUCT IS SLIGHTLY CHEAPER!!!!

tumblr: Gasp!  How triggering!

teenage feminist: There you have it.  The fact that one company makes razors cheaper for men and not women is… undeniable evidence that this thing I just made up called Gendertax is ABSOLUTELY REAL!!!!!!!!!

tumblr: Applause!  Checkmate MRAs and womenagainstfeminism!  This is why we need all the feminisms!

teenage feminist: Literally activism. 

First, it wasn’t “slightly cheaper”, it was a lot cheaper, for essentially the same product in a pretty colour. You got more refills with the man’s razor too.

But why are they more expensive?

1. Marketing. Good razors for women are viewed as being something of a luxury item, despite ….
2. Profiteering. There is more pressure on women to depilate, and they’re pressured to do it more extensively. (the legs and arms standard is nothing like the face and neck standard.) This is a really good way to make money, if you’re a shit.

This all sucks.

In conclusion: always buy men’s razors, they’re way cheaper and effectively identical. Or, you know, fuck the system and don’t bother.

Or, if you wanna shave go back further and get a single blade safety razor. Super cheap, gender neutral, and work just fine… :-)

digitaldiscipline:

fozmeadows:

shinykari:

fozmeadows:

The point at which men feel compelled to make a separate, masculine fandom name for themselves, the better to differentiate themselves from other, presumably female fans inhabiting the same space, is the point at which they feel their gender to be not only relevant to their expression of fandom, but so important that it needs its own word, lest we confuse them with women.

The fact that men seem only to be interested in doing this on entering traditionally or predominantly female fandoms says a lot about the logic behind it. Where fans are presumed to be male, there’s no need to assert their maleness with a masculine name; where fans are presumed to be female, however, they strive to differentiate themselves, not only to void the risk of being mistaken for women, but to rebrand the actual property as being for men. 

If such men were genuinely interested in disproving gender binaries and the sort of sexist logic that tries to steer their tastes in other directions, as is sometimes claimed, they wouldn’t feel the need to establish that the thing they like has masculine properties, as though they couldn’t or wouldn’t like it otherwise. This isn’t like the oft-ignored female fans of comics and videogames asserting, rightly, that such things are for everyone, which category happens to include them; it’s men expressly stating that an originally or traditionally feminine property isn’t really feminine, the better to make it for men.   

Following this logic, female-dominated fandoms are only worth joining if men can make absolutely sure that their support isn’t confused with female support, or their interests with female interests, the better to assert their more selective ownership of the property. Crucially, this move also has the effect of forcing women to either accept the gendering of the fandom and adopt their own, feminine nomenclature – possibly one the men themselves have created, heedless of the fact that it was irrelevant prior to their insistence that it wasn’t, as per the term pegasister – or to refuse the binary and so have the male term become synonymous with the fandom as a whole, as though male interest is the only kind that matters.

tl;dr: If you’re a guy and your first thought on approaching a new fandom is “how do I make a name that describes my interest in this thing while letting everyone know that I’m a dude”, then do us all a favour and stay the fuck out of it.

conceivablyanyone said in tags: #I think about this all the time  #it’s like guyliner or bromance  #why is masculinity so fragile that simply being associated with something that girls like is a huge threat to it  

I have an answer to this:

While English isn’t a gendered language in the sense of having a gendered grammar, like Spanish or German, we nonetheless have many words that possess both masculine and feminine forms, like actor and actress, author and authoress. Often in these instances, the masculine form of a word is synonymous with its neutral, default or original form, in keeping with the fact that feminine variants were later linguistic additions; often made, it must be said, not just because women had started doing a thing they’d previously been prevented from doing, but because men at the time wanted to establish that female efforts at the same pursuits were different (and likely inferior) to their own. 

Thus: women aren’t actors, they’re actresses; women aren’t authors, they’re authoresses, and while some of these feminine variants have more linguistic traction than others – we still say actress, but authoress sounds quaint and sexist – it’s noteworthy that there’s no commensurate tradition for making masculine variants of female forms. Nursing, for instance, is assumed to be a traditionally feminine career, but while we sometimes specify ‘male nurse’ as distinct from just ‘nurse’ – this being a rare professional default with a feminine implication – we’ve never gone so far as to make a whole new word for it.

Which is, I suspect, because there are so few historical instances of men moving into female spheres, rather than vice versa, until very, very recently. But now that it’s started to happen, what do we see? A discomfort with the idea of feminine terminology doubling as neutral. Rather than accepting that words like ‘romance’ and ‘eyeliner’ can be applied equally to men, we’re creating masculine variants whose express purpose is to prevent the traditionally feminine terms from becoming universal. Slowly, surely, we’ve been shedding those early feminine -ess words from the language, dropping them as we’ve come to see the lack of utility (and the surfeit of sexism) in unnecessarily distinguishing gender in such instances, thereby reverting to using the traditionally masculine forms as universal. But now that we have the opportunity to do the same with feminine forms, we’re baulking.

What’s most interesting about this, though, is that in both instances, it’s seemingly men creating and sustaining all the separate, unnecessarily gendered terms: first to deny women full membership of historically male professions and groups, and now to prevent themselves, however ineffectually, from being associated with traditionally feminine concepts.

Because language cooties.

… that is a fantastic goddamn analysis, Foz.

joichang:

riddlemetom:

unfollower:

I like how sweden just decided one day that gender is fucking bullshit so they got a gender neutral pronoun and stopped separating boy clothes and girl clothes and have pictures of spiderman pushing a baby stroller in a toy magazine why isn’t every country like sweden

you push that stroller sassy spiderman!

you fight those bad guys girlfriend!

you style that hair lil’ dude!

and in that moment, i swear we all wanted to be swedish.