Author: Alex

Categories
charity suffering for charity

Give money to charity, make Rachael suffer.

So, I keep seeing trailers for this:

And it makes me:

wpid-IMG_20140210_225202_787.jpg
Seriously fuck this movie and the pyroclastic flow outrunning horse it rode in on.

 

So here is your golden opportunity to do good in the world AND make Rachael suffer horribly.

PROGRESS TOWARD EARLIER ULTIMATE SUFFERING: $120/200

PROGRESS TOWARD ULTIMATE SUFFERING: $100/100 STAGE COMPLETE I’M SEEING THE STINKIN’ MOVIE

IF you all collectively donate at least $100 across the following charities by February 21, I will go watch Pompeii on Monday, February 24. (I’m pushing it back to Monday because I’ll be at ConDFW all that weekend.) And I will write a bitchy–ass review about it and post it here.

Charities for this round of suffering:

This one is honor system; just go directly to the charity and donate, then come back and leave me a comment, send me a tweet, etc to let me know how much you donated. I’ll do a running tally.

But what’s a fundraiser without some stretch goals?

If you all raise $200, I will go see it opening day, even though I’ll be in Dallas. Because you’ll have proven to me how thirsty you are to taste my existential (and scientific) anguish. I will hunt down a movie theater and do it.

If you all raise $300, I will take NOTES and provide a quasi–liveblog in addition to bitchy-ass reviewing. (Sorry, true liveblog is impossible; they tend to frown on you having a laptop out in the movie theater.)

AND

If you all raise $400, I will see it in 3D. That is how fucking serious I am about this. (You have no idea how much I hate 3D in movies.)

DO YOUR WORST. I DARE YOU.

You evil bastards THANK YOU:
JRD Skinner ($5)
Murdoch ($20)
Ingvar ($35 w/ $35 gift match [not counted])
Sin ($40)
Ay Bee (@geckospots) ($10)
Shae ($10)

Categories
rants sexism sfwa stoopid

You only hate boobs because you hate freedom.

Or: the most hilarisad thing I heard this weekend.

So, this ties back into the SFWA thing from last year. You know, the bulletin cover that made me sigh profoundly and roll my eyes? And then the wanksplosion that caused me to write a post to specifically say “Fuck you” to Malzberg and Resnick? It is the gift that keeps on giving. Only this time it’s just funny, in the same way watching a cat fall off a desk is funny.

There is apparently a petition circulating in regards to the SFWA bulletin because…censorship! And first amendment! And freedom! The petition is courtesy of David Truesdale. If you’ve never heard of him, read the review he did of Apex Magazine #55 and that’ll basically tell you what you need to know. He’s also, it’s important to note, not a member of SFWA, which makes the entire concept of this petition extra wtf-y.

The link to Radish Reviews really covers most of the mockery that immediately springs to mind. Holy double bonus fuck you asshole points to David Truesdale for his super gross allusions to slavery! Because not being able to belittle entire groups and enjoy scantily clad women courtesy of a professional organization is totally same as the injustices and crimes perpetrated upon countless people throughout history!

But three points.

One: While there is arguably a “female gaze” in operation in movies like, say, Twilight, “men get objectified too” is a bullshit argument. Particularly when the objectification being cited involves the big muscular manly man ideal. I’d argue most of the time, that stuff isn’t made for female consumption; it’s created as the manly ideal men are supposed to want to meet. (Another mention here, and a succinct summation here.) Which is, yes, still incredibly fucked up, but send your thank you note to the patriarchy and its ridiculous love of over-emphasized sexual dimorphism and gender roles.

Two: At this point, the moment I see the phrase “politically correct” I automatically roll my eyes. Because it is invariably a whiney, impotent asshole defending their supposed right to not only aggressively be an asshole, but to aggressively be an asshole in a sandbox over which they have no control. Here’s your “you tried” gold star.

Three, and by far the most important: SFWA is a professional organization. And it’s not the only professional organization of which I’m a member, so don’t even try to blow smoke up my ass on this one.

I’ve also been part of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) for years (far longer than I’ve been part of SFWA, actually). During those years, not once has AAPG sent me a bulletin that contained pictures of scantily clad women draped on rock formations or pretending to study seismic lines while sticking their pert bottoms in the air. Not once has AAPG sent me an official communication that included dismissive discussions of “lady geologists” and how hot the first wave of women in petroleum geoscience looked in bikinis. AAPG, I will also note, has an online moderation policy for its content that reserves the right to delete racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive comments.

(I suppose this must be because as much as they love oil and gas, they hate freedom. Or something.)

Now, this could be because I just haven’t been reading the bulletins carefully enough. And it’s not because geology as a science managed to completely avoid historical sexism. And it’s not that the G in AAPG actually stands for “gynocracy” because trust me, if you’ve ever been to the national meeting, you’d know that there are still way more men in the field than there are women.

So I’m just going to throw this out there: maybe there aren’t bikini babes in the AAPG bulletin because, I don’t know, AAPG is a fucking professional organization that has women in its membership and wants to maintain its credibility as an organization in the public eye.

How fucking hard is that to figure out?

I don’t give two shits if the historic legacy of an industry is one of bikini babes codified sexism. You know what? One way or another, that’s how it is in most industries! There is a difference between understanding the roots of one’s industry, and perpetuating and celebrating it. There’s a huge fucking difference. Particularly when those historic roots being perpetuated in a modern context are insulting to a big whack of your membership and the public.

The publications of an organization are its face to both the public and its membership. Effectively, what is in those pages is viewed as being in line with the organization’s values and vision because the organization fucking paid to put it there.

SFWA members don’t pay their $90 annual dues to be told what to think or how they should express themselves in the pages of the Bulletin, nor do they want their own thoughts (through their articles or columns) to be deemed “acceptable” or “right thinking,” or adhering to some jumped-up (always subject to change at whim) PC style manual by some hootenanny “advisory board”” of boot lickers. [from here, pdf from main post]

Yeah, you know what I don’t pay $90 for? Being belittled by the professional organization of which I’m a member.

Go fuck yourself.

Categories
personal thinking out loud you need to do better

Disappointment

Recently, I was majorly disappointed. This is because I am a human being who lives in the real world.

When I experienced this latest disappointment, I indulged myself in about thirty seconds of high-pitched, anger and self-pity-filled, internal screaming. Then I took a deep breath and said out loud, so I had to hear it: “Well, this isn’t about you.” And then I made myself let it go so I could focus on what came next.

My housemate watched this minor drama as it unfolded and said she’s never seen anyone else deal like that. Is it that unusual? I don’t know that many people, and haven’t been around most of them when they’re having a crap day.

But hey, maybe it’s worth talking about.

Disappointment sucks. No shit, it sucks. It feels terrible. It’s a massive let down, excitement and happiness and expectation going from mach 1 to hitting a brick wall. Instant stop and total annihilation. It’s a low, awful, destructive feeling. But you know what? It’s part of life. To be blunt, it’s a major part of life.

We live in a complex world full of forces and people who are completely outside of our control. Neither the world, nor the people who populate it, exist to make us happy or make us feel good about ourselves, let alone give us what we want. So when something good we’re hoping for happens, that’s awesome. But the chance of that is just as random as something shitty and disappointing happening.

One of the things I find most comforting about the universe is that it is quite literally incapable of caring about us. If something shitty and disappointing happens, there is no malice behind it, no messed up biblical judgment. Sometimes things just happen the way they happen. And even when it involves people, I’d argue the disappointments caused by actual malicious intent are pretty rare1. People aren’t [normally] out to get you. It’s just the way they’re working things out doesn’t quite jive with what you wanted. So with that in mind, who is there to get mad or upset at, when something disappointing happens? Unless you know that someone screwed you over just to be an asshole, there is no place to direct your anger.

And maybe it’s different for other people, but for me anger without direction has always been self-destructive. It turns inward and gnaws on my heart like a wolf. It turns me into someone I don’t like.

I don’t know if I’ve had a better education in disappointment than most. I don’t think I had a particularly disappointing childhood. Maybe I’ve had a bit more experience with the sensation in recent years, since I started selling my writing. Because as a friend recently pointed out, art and disappointment are like peanut butter and jelly. You spend so much time hearing “no” that you come to expect it. Maybe that’s the shift. Maybe I’ve switched over to expecting to be disappointed, so I’m pleasantly surprised when I’m not.

But I don’t think that’s quite it. I’m not natively a pessimist. The more important lesson of disappointment is there is always life afterwards. And there is life immediately afterwards. The world does not pause on its axis, because the world does not care how badly your heart has just been broken. You still have to get up and go to work and feed the cats and interact with other human beings. Who may be sympathetic, if you’re lucky, but there’s a very set limit to how much wallowing in upset anyone is willing to hear out.

This is why, by the way, I think parents who try to shield their children from disappointment probably aren’t doing them any favors. When you’re five years old and don’t get what you want, you can get away with having a screaming meltdown, and you get the chance to then learn that when it’s all over, nothing has changed and now you feel physically awful too. A screaming meltdown is a much less acceptable response when you’re 30 years old, no matter how good you think it would feel at the time. The world will still be the same once you’re done crying, but you’ll have embarrassed yourself and probably gotten snot all over your nice shirt.

The real lesson I’ve taken from disappointment is this: You will never be able to control who and what will disappoint you, when it will happen, and how much it will hurt. The only things in the world you have any control over at all is how you deal with it and what you do next.

Which is hard. I’m not claiming it’s easy. Letting go of pain and anger and upset is never easy. If you’re incredibly lucky, maybe you can take that disappointment and make it into something greater. Maybe you can say fuck you, I know my art is worth something and turn it into determination. Maybe you can say fuck you, this isn’t how the world should be and go out there and start working for change. Maybe you can say fuck you, this is only tearing me down, and cut loose a toxic relationship.  Maybe you can say fuck you, you tried to destroy me, and now I’m going to build something bigger and better and I hope you choke on it.

But those kind of disappointments? I think they’re pretty rare, to be honest.

I’m not here to preach lemons into lemonade crap, because frankly a lot of the lemons life hands you aren’t so much lemons as leaky bags of radioactive dog shit and there is nothing good to be made from them. But there is still life after, and it’s up to you to decide what to do about it. Are you going to give up on your art? Are you going to lay in bed for two days and not move? Are you going to hold onto that anger and lash out at anyone you think might be to blame? Are you going to poison your next project? Are you going to break things for the sheer pleasure of hearing them smash?

What you choose to do must be more important than the pain you currently feel. Disappointment sucks. But disappointment is also a teacher. And sometimes it teaches us more about ourselves than we ever wanted to know.

Ultimately, this is the best solution I’ve ever found: You take a deep breath. You let it out slowly. You say, “Well, that sucks. But it’s not personal.”  Maybe if it’s been a particularly big disappointment, you have yourself a good cry, then go out to your favorite Tex Mex place and have disappointment fajitas and a margarita.

Then you get on with your goddamn life, because what the hell else are you going to do?

 

1 – Though obviously here, depending on the situation at hand we need to acknowledge the existence of institutional bias and prejudice, etc. That’s not really what I’m talking about here, but I feel it’s important to note that these are things that exist, and while not necessarily consciously malicious, will act in much the same way.

Categories
movie

[Movie] Her

I’m having a hard time writing about this movie, because it hit me that hard. And Her isn’t nice about the way it hits you, either. No, first it lulls you into a false sense of security, making you think this will be a weird, quirky and awkward comedy where everyone wears high-waisted trousers, and then by the time you realize that this is actually very serious and intensely real it’s too late and you’re crying your eyes out in a theater and just hoping you don’t drip snot on your t-shirt because you didn’t think you’d need to bring a box of tissues along. This movie sucker punches your emotions in the nuts.

And this is the thing. It’s not cheap or manipulative oh my favorite character died. What hits you in this movie is that the pain is so very ordinary and human.

For all that this is a film about a man in an indistinct future year who falls in love with an artificial intelligence, the heart of the story isn’t the science fiction conceit, and I think that’s what makes it so powerful. Most of the time, speculative fiction is at its best when it uses that unreal element to explore what it is to be human, how we relate to each other, how we fit into the world. Her does that with beauty that looks almost effortless.

This is the most human movie I’ve seen in a long time. There are so many moments in the film that are pure, distilled awkwardness, sometimes played for laughs, sometimes painful, sometimes just there. Because let’s face it, being human is fucking awkward. That alone makes everything feel much more real than it has any right to be. The relationships are messy, and there are no easy answers offered. It’s about love, and relating to other people, and letting go, and being lonely, and relationships ending, and relationships beginning and…just everything that is really the lifeblood of being human that is beautiful and agonizing. There are no heroes or villains, there are just people–and I include the AI Samantha in that category.

I also should note that Her is visually gorgeous too, but it’s all a very ordinary sort of beauty, like a shot of steam escaping from under a manhole cover. They used the color orange a lot, which I haven’t seen often, and it feels very earthy, very rich. It’s not a blue-tinted scifi world, and I think even that made it feel more real. Everything looked like the colors we see around us in daily life, with perhaps a bit of haze.

I’m glad I watched Her, even if I spent the rest of the night feeling like someone had run over my heart with a truck. Definitely the best piece of scifi/fantasy from 2013–and 2013 was actually a good year for sf/f–and maybe the best I’ve seen in years. As a writer, I’m still struck by the complexity in the characters and their relationships and I came out of it hoping that some day I can manage to produce a piece of art like that. It’s beautiful. Take a box of tissues with you.

Categories
someone is wrong on the internet you need to do better

People who disagree with you are not stupid. Or insane.

Just as a quick note, since I know a lot of people (including myself) have been scratching out heads over the avalanche of straw men that kicked off this mess, and wondering what the heck is going on with that. I’ve had and observed several conversations that basically go:

  • Other person: Alex said X.
  • Me: No she didn’t. She said Z.
  • Other person: No, she said X.
  • Me: But see here? Look. At the words. She says Z.
  • Other person: Well I disagree. She said X.
  • And so on forever until I gnaw on my desk.

I know I’m not the only one. And I’ve seen a lot of dismissive variations on “these people are idiots.” Yeah, I get that this is frustrating, when you can’t even get the other person to acknowledge that a fact is, you know, actually a fact1. But it’s an enormous mistake to dismiss people who disagree with you like this as stupid/delusional/insane2.

[ETA: Please note that this is specifically in regards to arguments that involve untrue facts or statements that are provably untrue. Policy arguments, value judgments, and the like? I don’t think you should be dismissing people as stupid/delusional/insane over that either, but it’s also not the topic at hand here.]

To start with, then you start sounding like people who say things like, “All liberals want to destroy free speech.” Or whatever. It’s sloppy thinking, it’s dehumanizing, and if your opponent in an argument is doing a thing that’s pissing you off, it behooves you to not retaliate by doing the same thing.

The thing you have to realize is generally, people who point at an untrue fact or statement and indicate that this is the hill they are willing to die on are not stupid. They are more likely just very, very invested in a worldview that requires said untrue fact or statement to be true.

Carol Tavris did an excellent talk about this at TAM 2011, in regards to dissonance theory: (start at around 10:30 for the really pertinent stuff)

This is the money quote:

The problem we face then is not just bad or foolish people doing bad and foolish things and justifying them. It’s good people, smart people, ethical people, competent people who do foolish and wrongheaded things and justify them in order to preserve their belief that they’re smart, good, ethical, and competent.

Does considering the situation from this angle make any difference to the current argument? Eh, probably not. Lines have already been drawn, and I feel like a certain set of self identified “conservatives” are invested in the idea that Alex is the evil queen of the liberal literati and wants to force every writer to adhere to a ridiculous checklist. Somehow. (Originally a hyperbolic statement? Quite possibly. When it’s being repeated and defended like actual truth, though, it stops being merely a ridiculous rhetorical device.)

But I really wanted to point this out because it happens on the internet. A lot. And it’s easy to dismiss other people as stupid and willfully blind, particularly when the frustration level starts to climb. But if nothing else, going to that mental place effects your rhetoric, which can mean sounding like a total jerk if there are undecided bystanders, and also act as confirmation for such belief affirming statements as, “all [group] are whiny assholes.” Etc.

And I also wanted to point this out because each and every one of us is capable of being in this mental position. (I know I sure have been before, and it’s not a fun hole to climb out of.) So be mindful of that. Be as critical toward your own reasoning as you are to anyone else’s.

As in all things, your mileage may vary. Goodness knows I’m not perfect at this, and I have zero room to be preaching at people. But I felt compelled to point this out because I’ve been making a very conscious effort lately to be mindful of the basic humanity in other people, even if they lack the courtesy to recognize my basic humanity and that of my friends in return.

That’s the kind of person I want to be. Even if sometimes I can only manage it after I’ve stepped away from the keyboard, taken some deep breaths, and counted to ten. Twice. In every language I know the numbers for.

 

1 – Welcome to the goddamn life of anyone who has ever done any research related to climate science. Whee.

2 – And seriously stop using insanity or implications of mental illness as a go-to. Political opinions and nearly all conspiracy thinking are not mental illness. This is not a path you want to go down, and it’s extremely insulting and dismissive to anyone who has an actual mental illness. (And this is a thing I need to be aware of myself, since I have a tendency to throw around the word crazy. Sigh.)

Categories
gender logical fallacies science fiction

Geeze, Larry Correia, leave some straw men for the rest of us.

So, Larry Correia wrote a fantastically dickish blog post about Alex Dally MacFarlane’s post on Tor.com in regards to the default gender binary represented in mainstream SF literature. The post in question involved Alex making the incredibly revolutionary1 observation that transwomen and transmen, you know, exist. As well as other people who do not conform to the strict, aggressively Leave It To Beaver-ish gender binary that’s still presented as the default. And it’s time to get away from that being the default. And hey, there have already been works written that touch on the issue, so let’s discuss those and then move forward. (Alex, if you ever happen to read this, I hope I have not misrepresented your position overmuch in my rather flippant summary.)

Jim Hines, bless him from his shiny head to his sofa-marrying heart2, possesses such intestinal fortitude and abundance of spare time that he’s done a point by point take down of Correia’s post.

My normal inclination here is to have the same response as I had to John C. Wright and his wall of misogy-text, namely: would you get a load of this fuckin’ guy. But there are a few things that are bothering me particularly, though. In short:

  1. Correia spends the whole time calling Alex “he” in his original post. (Alex isn’t a man. It takes exactly one google search or two clicks to double check that.[ETA] Her bio is literally at the bottom of her post. What kind of fucking laziness does this take?) I actually went and looked at Correia’s blog to see if he corrected himself, and he did… kinda? Somewhere in the word salad of this long response to Jim he corrects himself on Alex being “she,” airily dismisses it as a mistake and says he further doesn’t care anyway BECAUSE IDEAS NOT PEOPLE. Perhaps at this point misrepresenting someone’s gender feels like a drop in the ocean of douchery, and that’s the excuse for not taking two seconds to type out the word ‘sorry.’ But it’s a damn pathetic excuse.
  2. Seriously, what is with the dog whistle liberal versus conservative culture war bullshit framing? Perhaps this is bothering me more than normal because in my offline life, I just had a strong reminder that being conscious of gender identification isn’t a default liberal versus conservative issue, it’s a not being a douchebag issue.
  3. Correia’s thesis as written seems to be that (a) straw Alex wants all books to be nothing but non-standard characters and there will be checklists nothing but checklists forever, (b) this would make everything a preachy issue book (presumably because straw Alex does not care about story?), therefore (c) that would destroy the genre of science fiction.
  4. The “I don’t like thing X, therefore if you write thing X IT WILL DESTROY THE GENRE,” line has gotten so common that I believe it deserves its own name. It’s like an appeal to consequences and appeal to tradition got together and had an ugly, whiny baby. Any suggestions? The best I’ve got is Appeal to Destruction, and that’s admittedly tepid.
  5. Correia keeps coming back to story being the most important thing. I don’t think there’s any halfway decent writer who would argue the point that story is where it’s at. So where the fuck is this disconnect? How does what Alex actually said in any way preclude the primacy of story? How does even making a conscious effort to write non-default characters equal preachy issue book? Is there some kind of mathematical proof I’m missing out on here that shows the number of transgender or genderqueer characters is inversely proportional to the amount of story and/or fun?
  6. Geeze, dude, leave some straw men for the rest of us. Seriously. Worldwide shortage.
  7. Cisgender hetero guy with enormous biceps kills vampires and then must face their sire in a world-shattering showdown versus Transwoman with slightly less enormous biceps kills vampires then must face their sire in a world-shattering showdown would both be driven by the same basic story. Each would be distinct because, say, for option B you’d have to consider how the heroine’s status as trans would effect her interactions with other characters and all of their choices–yet in the end it’s still about some badass killing a shitload of vampires and saving the world.
  8. I do not tend to buy books that promise to preach at me. But you know what I will go out of my way to buy? Books with female protagonists. Books with explicitly bisexual protagonists. Because like all human beings, I’m an egocentric jerk and I enjoy being able to see people like me in stories, saving the world and doing other badass shit. [ETA: I would hope this goes without saying, but you never know. I want good and interesting books with the aforementioned and following. Books with excellent story, which very much do exist when combined with “non-default” main characters. Yeesh.] But you know what else I’ll go out of my way to buy? Books with genderqueer protagonists. Books with non-white protagonists. Books with protagonists from cultures other than my own. Why? Because I want to imagine things outside of myself as well. And imagining ye olde heterosexual white dude? We all basically know how to put those shoes on mentally before we can tie our literal shoelaces in the real world.

 

1 – Mmm, sarcasm italics. How I have missed you.

2 – Some of the comments on Jim’s post are gold.

Categories
silly

[“Fiction”] And My Death Song, the Chair

[TW: Melodramatic suicide]

I lean against the metal door, the cold of it biting through the inadequate barrier of my jeans and jacket. My head throbs, skin pulled by the bandaid I stuck to my forehead to pull that split skin shut. It had looked disturbingly like a grin, gape-mouthed and toothless, on my forehead, like mockery. My head still throbs under it, though some pain is worth it, worth everything.

The wind tugs at the photograph in my hands, and I clutch it tighter to my chest, wincing at the sound of crinkling paper. Like somehow every wrinkle will become a crack in your dear body, though isn’t it too late to think of such things?

I let the skyline, gray with clouds and spiked with buildings, draw me away from the door, to the cornice that surrounds the roof. This is an old building, an ornate one. There is no fence, no railing.

It is on the edge of the cornice I sit. The stone is cold and hard beneath me, but I can still imagine myself in a different place, a different time. Instead of the dirty city stretched out before me, I see a stage. Instead of stone beneath me, I feel thinly cushioned wood. Instead of the wind, I hear the scrape of wood on wood. I can almost envision you then, sitting in that piercing spotlight, so upright and noble, yet sturdy, comfortable. Comforting.

These are the harsh truths that I have learned, in the time since our gazes locked across that theater: Strength offered in silence is ignored. People would rather have the pretty vase than the graceful pedestal upon which is sits. The world tears up those who offer themselves tirelessly, body and soul for their art, and casts them aside as soon as the first crack or splinter worries a thread in their overpriced trousers. Only the perfect image matters, not the far more interesting reality beneath, with its knots and imperfections.

I cannot say how many times I tried to reach you, but always circumstances got in the way, always other people running interference. Our only time together was across that stage, with that light an impenetrable wall between us. Not enough time, not enough time, and then time was up. That last day I arrived just in time to see you be hustled onto a waiting truck, to snap the photograph with my iPhone.

Oh my love, my love. I didn’t realize. If I’d known, I would have acted then. But we always tell ourselves that there will be a later, at some other time when we are better dressed or more prepared or just not so busy. I was a fool.

I look down at the paper in my hands. At least I have this one token, this stolen moment in time. How many dreams I’ve had over this picture, imagining myself reading a book with you, or leaning back comfortably against you at our desk, or saucily pretending to be Liza Minnelli in Cabaret before we both dissolve into giggles.

Now just fruitless dreams never to be realized.

It was only today that I learned the truth, spoken in such an offhand way by a person I had only just met. How we got onto the topic of you, I no longer remember; I think rage knocked it from my head. All I can recall of the conversation was the amused, dismissive laugh and the words that broke my heart, the words that made me break open my head on his nose: “Are you kidding? After an entire run of getting thrown around and jumped on? All the chairs were falling apart. We had them recycled.”

Recycled. As if you are something so disposable. No. I do not wish to dream in a world like this.

I close my eyes and place myself back in the theater, with you across the stage. But this time it will be different. This time, I rise from my seat to launch myself across the stage to snatch you up.

The show can go on without us both.

Categories
ask a geologist

[Ask a Geologist] Young coal and petroleum

Andrew asked:

Would a planet terraformed fifteen million years ago have any petroleum or coal reserves? If so, how would the extent of the deposits compare to Earth?

So, in order to get petroleum or coal, you need the following:

  1. Lots of organic matter building up
  2. Heat and pressure via burial
  3. Time

How much time? That’s kind of the question. You need enough time for geologic processes (normally subsidence) to bury the deposits of organic matter deeply enough that they get pressure cooked at around 49-149C, and then those deposits need to stay cooking long enough for the heat and pressure to crack the organic matter into more familiar hydrocarbons.  How long is that going to take precisely? To be honest, we don’t precisely know. Probably hundreds of thousands of years, not counting the sheer time it’s going to take to bury everything deeply enough.

That said, we at least have an idea of a minimum time, just because we can look at the youngest oil and coal deposits in the world, which are Oligocene to Miocene in age–that gives us a range between about 5.3 and 36.6 million years old.

So yes, as long as your terraforming ramped up quickly enough that you had lots of plants and plankton to die and get buried on land and in the ocean, and your planet was tectonically active enough for active burial (and the temperature and pressure curves line up appropriately for burial) you could potentially have petroleum and coal.

There would probably be a lot less in the way of reserves than we have on Earth, just because your production window would be so much shorter than the one we’ve got. On Earth, we’ve had coal deposits forming since the Carboniferous (a ~355 million year window) and petroleum deposits go back even further, into the Proterozoic (a >565 million year formation window). Just how big the difference will be depends also on how much organic matter your new world is pumping out–if you’re having a mini carboniferous for all 15 million of those years, for example, it still won’t be that much in comparison, but it would be more significant than if your world looks like the Permian.

Categories
flowchart

Flowchart: When is it acceptable to touch someone else’s hair?

hair flowchart

It’s been so many years since I had long hair and was subjected to random strangers touching it, I’d almost forgotten that this is a thing that happens. But I’ve been reminded in discussion, so here. I made this handy flowchart because apparently this is still a topic that leaves some people mystified.

Categories
feminism rants

I only cut my hair because I hate you

So there was another one of those articles going around. I’m not going to link to it. It’s bullshit clickbait misogynistic trolling and you can find it via my tumblr if you desperately want to. But come on, you know how those articles go:

Women do a thing I personally do not find attractive! I am shocked that they do not care deeply about my opinions on how they look. In fact, the only possible reason for their not caring about this important topic is that they’re mentally unstable and unfeminine! I will now back it up with a series of bullshit anecdotes and call it a day! Knock it off, women, or no man will ever want to fuck you–and by no man I mean me, only I totally would if you’d just acknowledge I exist please please oh pretty please oh god I’m so alone there’s a literal layer of rust on my penis help me I’m going to die and get eaten by my pet reptiles one of these days and no one will even notice I’m gone–and the very idea of that should shake you to the very foundation of your being.

idgaf

i dont care

Yeah, yeah, whatever. It’s good for a game of name that logical fallacy, but that’s basically it. This kind of nonsense really just boils down to the supposition that everything women do should be with pleasing men in mind, and the very idea that we might be doing it for ourselves is too shocking to consider.

I’ve got my own anecdotes, and one thing I’d point out is that most of the women I know who wear makeup? Don’t do it for guys. They do it because they like how it looks and it makes them feel powerful. It’s like social war paint.

And me? My decision to have short hair has nothing to do with latent masculinity, psychological damage, or a desire to scare the shit out of insecure little boys on the internet. (Though god if I’d known short hair was going to make penises shrivel up and fall off with its mere existence, I would have shaved my head a decade ago.) I used to have hair down to almost my waist. Then I had to spend close to a month helping out on a drilling rig. In Wyoming. In the summer.

Do you know what kind of pain in the ass it is to try to wear a hard hat with hair that long? And how freaking dirty your hair gets? You bet your ass I cut that shit off, down to an A-line. And then I spent a summer in Houston, where I didn’t have a car. I biked everywhere. And I discovered that even chin length hair is just Too Damn Much Hair when you’re that sweaty (oh right, proof that I’m not an actual girl, because I sweat EW GROSS), so off the rest of it went.

At which point I discovered that I look pretty damn good with short hair, and that it’s actually faster and easier to get short hair to look cute to my satisfaction. Three minutes with a hair dryer, a teensy bit of product, and I am more than satisfied. I like how it looks. I like that it’s easy to maintain. I like that I can completely dye it in less than ten minutes and don’t spend time better used writing our sleeping out playing with my cats trying to pick tangles out of it. I like that my fucking hair doesn’t control my life.

Maybe that’s why this is so existentially threatening to people who are inclined to pen articles complaining about women and our personal beauty decisions. I didn’t cut my hair because I hate men, or because I needed an outward expression of my deep psychological issues, or because I want to destroy western civilization and replace it with a dystopian gynocracy. This isn’t about them and never has been. No matter how much time I might choose to spend with someone else, when it’s the middle of the night and the monsters are howling on the doorstep, I’m the one who faces them wearing my own skin and in that moment it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

I cut my hair because it’s my hair, growing on my head, and I like it that way. And I really couldn’t give less of a shit about outside objections.

Guys, we like you, we really do. Or at least some of us do, whether in a sexual way or not. And this might be difficult to grasp, but try: even if we like you, you are not the center of our worlds. I know it’s a horrifying revelation, especially after most widely available media has spent your entire life telling you that you are totally the most important thing on the planet. But I think you’ll live a happier and more fulfilled life if you can manage to grasp the simple idea that we don’t care if you want to fuck us. In fact, if you’re going to write stupid shit like that, we’d really rather you didn’t.

Thank you.