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Of late, I’ve been forcibly reminded that while I have a very broad aesthetic taste in men, it doesn’t coincide neatly with who I want to mess around with. And there are alot of older (less than 10 years, usually) guys that I think look great. But when it comes to making out, my interest rapidly wanes. With a few noteworthy exceptions. I think that alot of it is a maladaptive response. By which I mean, I have a reflex to jump someone’s bones, or go along with jumping their bones, if I think they look good. This reflex has served me ill on many occasions.

Talking with a certain friend of mine in California less than a year ago, I’d said that I wondered if we were used to responding to certain situations differently. In that case I was talking about stress. He’s a very athletic, outdoorsy, fellow, and, when wanting stimulation, and perhaps when under stress, he goes out and does athletic stuff, and may occasionally engage in risky rockclimbing behavior. That’s a theory, it’s not intended so much as a description of him, as a theoretical model for contrast. I have often taken the bonobo strategy: using sex as the preferred palliative for nearly all forms of distress. Which clearly creates problems all its own.

Feige had a lecture on a theme which she often repeated in my presence: “Yeah, he’s pretty. But there are also pretty paintings. I don’t want to fuck the paintings.” (something about me seems to encourage that sort of repetition of theme, see also ‘s frequent comments on my “goal oriented” nature).

What does one do with aesthetically pleasing, but sexually unappealing people? (A very distinct class from the sexually appealing, but sexually unavailable people, though I can’t help seeng some bizarre connection). Enh, just food for thought.

Yay, I’m here. =)

Thursdays are always my long day, and tacking a plane trip on to it does nothing to make it shorter. Starting off with godawful early gymanstics, staying seated for most of the day, and carrying lots of heavy bags around when not seated, sitting on a plane which (again) sits on the runway for inordinately long span of time, then sleeping on a couch has left me a little sore, but still glad to be here.

Stayed up late talking with my wonderful host . Sadly, that may be the longest span of time that I get to see him this trip, but we shall see. =)

Also unexpectedly ran into Seth, whom I haven’t seen in years, on the L. He was getting off a stop before mine, I was checking out the station signs and there was the uncertain eyes meeting, so I took a longer walk than necessary, but had the opportunity to get ribbed by him about my housing instability. I would still be very amused to introduce him to Seth Kingman (friend from cmu, and long time minneapolis resident). I can’t help but dread the abuse by wit I would suffer were the two ever to meet, but it would be terribly entertaining. =)

Today I will continue to lounge for a bit, post several entries I’ve been meaning to get around to, grab some food at the Blind Faith Cafe, then head down to downtown to use the library’s wireless and hang out with Ellen (of Simon) when she gets free. Then more Joel time. And tomorrow I’ll probably go swimming with the smelts, hang out with and who sadly won’t be joining me for the concert later in the evening, go to the concert, come back here and get ready to go back to minneapolis.

Brief, but enjoyable. And it’s so much warmer here. Why, I bet it’s barely below freezing outside. =)

posted a link to a recent feminist’s view of the porn industry from the inside. I don’t know much about the straight porn industry, but she paints a pretty grizzly picture of nasty treatment of women in many of the products. I’ll even bite that some gay porn is exploitative (though it was interesting to see Shannon (my ex roommate, and, like the author of the linked to piece, an asian female) avoid the question when I asked her how gay porn played into her theory of porn being at its fundamental base the exploitation of women by men).

I generally believe that no one is forced to do porn (or, rather, those few that are have a very valid legal basis for action), and even that not liking one’s job isn’t a good reason to declare that job off limits, because people are free to quit. Some standards for workplace safety ought to apply, certainly. And things like sexual harrassment should still be treated the same as any other job. In short, I guess, my take is, it’s work. Treat it like a job, because that’s what it is.

I woke up from a dream in which I stepped out of a big building, into an open space between more big buildings, on a clear day.

It was a group of administration mucketymucks. I ended up grilling Condoleeza Rice trying to understand how she saw the world and thought the policies she was party to were helping. Lots of pointed questions. And each time she answered with a smiling “Well, don’t you realize x, y, z” sort of answer, in a tone that got progressively more impersonally annoyed as it went along, as if she were coming to realize that my parents had “ruined” me, and I was “unsalvageable”.

Dreams are interesting things. =)

Yet another sign that supporting our troops means opposing bush.

courtesy

It’s hard being an upper middle class white male with an excess endowment of congenital brains…

Okay, so really, I’m just a whiny bitch

I just discovered sherlock on my mac. It seems like an “Excellent idea, but needs alot of work” sort of thing. The inability to control its search radius for movie theaters, or the phone book, for instance. The need to register with some service for the flight information. It’s good that they have it all in one place (though it does tickle my “who is selecting the search space” paranoia), but still needs some work in control. The fact that it misinterpeted my zipcode as a street number for somewhere in hawaii, another downside.

So, there’s this music video associated with Yossi and Jagger. The singer is hot, and bears a strong resemblance to . It’s also kinda weird to hear pop music with the phlegm gathering noises in hebrew, but strangely cool. Or maybe I’m just letting his pecs get to me, but I don’t really care. =)

On valentine’s day (singles awareness day) with the many unpaired whining about our lack of pairedness, it brings to mind the ranking system that society tells us we ought to have. Romantic love above familial love above love of one’s friends. Except possibly for love of one’s children, that may be the trump suit of love, though it’s possible that that applies mostly to women.

Ranking these things on this basis is rather silly to me, but I definitely feel the force of this frame of mind.

Friends rock. And I appreciate y’all.

So, let’s say that some people are “creative”. And creative people enjoy generating IP. They do it for fun and financial reward is essentially irrelevant, beyond the extent to which it allows them to create the IP. Their creativity can be developed to improve the quality of the output, etc. Practice, education, crosspollination of ideas among creatives.

But no story can be appreciated for its brilliance without being read. No schematic will compute pi to some absurd number of decimal places. Music can only go so far without amplification, and so on.

Large corporations are highly sensitive to financial reward. And they know that IP leads to financial reward. So, they pick and choose creatives, elevate them to the minimum state necessary to retain them, then harvest their ideas, their artworks, and their inventions. They prepare them for easy digestion and ready use by the public.

The creatives not so cultivated still produce things, but they rarely go widespread or highly profitable. Not because corporations never pick badly, but because the good ones left behind rarely have the resources to actualize their ideas.

In an ideal economy, corporations would bid for the creatives bringing them up to their true worth in compensation. And when one creative got too expensive (superstars), they’d go to a slightly less expensive one. But frequently, creatives simply don’t care about fiscal rewards.

The important note here is that there are many ideas which don’t get developed, some of which may well be profitable, but due to a[n artificial] shortage of bullhorns to put in front of creatives, many valuable ideas never go anywhere, so that the big movers and shakers can capture the market for themselves. And if there is an up and coming star, the corporations would seek to acquire it, and incorporate its ip stock into their own, using it if that would be most profitable, and gradually sabotaging it, preventing it from competing if not.

It’s a plausible story, but plausible stories are easy to come by.

Just a thought that occurred to me the other day, dunno why.