"“Klaatu… verata… n… Necktie. Nectar. Nickel. Noodle.” – Army of Darkness
So it’s been a long, long while and I doubt anyone is still reading this blog, but I’m going to try to write sporadically again. I’ve been inspired by Manton Reece’s microbloging evangelism.
When I first mention my polyamorous relationship, most people ask if it's emotionally difficult—not only in terms of jealousy, but all in regards to the balance of attention amongst partners. The reply to both is: in other intimate relationships, we deal with these dilemmas all the time. Upon hearing friends scoring exciting jobs, I often feel jealous, but that doesn't prevent me from feeling happy for them. Parents must learn a balancing act between their children—they cannot give all their attention to each all the time. These emotions and conflicts are real and difficult, but they don't have to absolutely determine our actions or absolutely define our relationships.
Moreover, the balancing of attention is often a strength of polyamory. After all, in a monogamous relationship, you may not have to split time between multiple partners, but you do have to share your partner with all the other people in her life. Sometimes this leads to unavoidable conflicts.
A hypothetical: your sister comes into town once each fall to tailgate and share a football game with you. Since you were children, football has been an vital part of your relationship, and it has helped keep you close despite living on opposite coasts. On the other hand, your partner hates football; he'd rather be hung upside down by his toes, slathered in peanut butter, and covered with army ants than go to a game. Most years he's content to spend the day alone, but, this year, his grandfather passes away the night before the game.
This situation sucks. Either you give up an important day with your sister, or your partner has to find another emotional support on short notice. While both will understand your decision no matter what you choose, all three of you are going to feel pretty shitty. You will feel guilty abandoning one of the people you love, one of them will feel guilty taking you away from someone you love, and the other will miss you terribly.
Now, a polyamorous relationship will not make everything better1, but it does provide another option—the third2 partner can stay with the mourner and you can spend the afternoon with your sister. Your conscience may not be completely clear, but you will know your partner has someone there who cares as much about him as you do. No one has to stress out about finding a friend at the last minute; no one has to sacrifice an emotionally important need; no one has to feel deeply guilty.
Yes, to some extent this is both an extreme and ideal scenario3, but the principle still holds in more mundane situations4. In a polyamorous relationship, there are more emotional resources available—each person does not need to be the sole5 anchor for the other. Today's culture spreads extended families6 far apart, pushing us to rely on a primary romantic relationship. It even idealizes this reliance. But this asks too much of any one person, any one bond. The strain can be too much. Even if it does not precipitate a divorce, the stress and added guilt will still make everyone feel even worse. Just listen to almost any episode of Savage Lovecast to hear husbands and wives ask how to stay with their partner after years of chronic illness. Dan even has a story of his own: a promise to stay there forever with a former boyfriend dying of AIDS, when “forever” meant at most a year. Then the first effective drugs finally became available, and “forever” was no longer a promise Dan could keep.
This is not to say that polyamory is the right choice for everyone7, nor that friends and family may not still fill these roles. Rather, it does show that concrete emotional advantages exist. That polyamory makes some situations easier even as it makes others more complex. That sharing partners can be a wondrous, blessed thing.
Your partner's grandfather has just died, after all. ↩
And/or fourth, fifth, etc. ↩
There's a death in the family; your sister only comes in once each fall; your other partner(s) is free. ↩
Work parties, vacation interests, 24-hour flus, among others. ↩
Or most important, most available, etc. ↩
Even those families we choose. Close friends may move out of town for work; your college roommate will probably not end up in the same city as you do; suburbs are more dispersed than ever. ↩
Especially as our culture still elevates the primacy of sexual and emotional exclusivity. ↩
So, to recap one final time, I've cobbled together an AppleScript that copies blogging related links from my Privacy Locked personal Pinboard to the ReadingGeorgeFox account. While I'm not yet back in NYC—now it's Jersey rather than Upstate—I've found a printer and the the time to annotate the script. Some credit: I used Rafael Bugajewski's DEVONthink Pro Pinboard Importer as a starting point; I have modified it a fair amount, though. Anyways, here goes nothing: 1
Lines 9 thru 11 download the bookmarks via simple curl2 commands. When I began working on the script, I was still confused about the url syntax for tags, so I set up three separate downloads. This ended up making some later processing simpler, and, as the downloads were so small,3 I decided to keep it this way. As for downloading to files instead of passing the data directly to the rest of the script, it was easier to troubleshoot and AppleScript seems to be happier pulling data from a file on disk. Lastly, I'm using Pinboard API tokens instead of passwords. While I could have used Keychain scripting to be extra secure, these scripts are run locally on my machine and I figured the ability to revoke the tokens would provide enough safety.4
Luckily, System Events understands xml5: in line 15, I pull in the contents of the “to_blog” bookmarks. The following lines 19 thru 88 are the heart of script, in which each attribute is parsed. The repeat in line 19 could also be structured as repeat with xDatum in xData; however, Script Debugger did not show any performance improvement, and I felt this format made things clearer.6 The url and time attributes are pretty straightforward—the fun really starts at line 25. Being a newbie at scripting, I had quite the time figuring out why things weren't working7. Pinboard's xml is sent in a nice, human readable format, just chock full of illegal characters when used in urls. Once I finally realized the problem, I turned to Bare Bones' free and wonderful TextWrangler 8 to re-encode the text in lines 29 thru 37. As mentioned in the comments, it is pretty dog slow (outside of AppleScript, grep would be far preferable). On the other hand, I'm not dealing with that much data, the script runs in the middle of the night, and Bare Bones' syntax is a model of what AppleScript should be.
Encoding the Description is a repeat of the previous. One note is Pinboard's xml does not include line breaks; first time through I ended up with endless blocks of text. To keep the descriptions readable, I started including four spaces in each line break. In line 50, TextWrangler replaces them with two LF character codes.
Lines 68 thru 88 process the tags. I did not want to clutter the blog's account with my idiosyncratic9 tagging system; instead, I settled on bookmark status10 and related posts.11 As the initial curl scripts separated the bookmarks by status, I just needed to deal with the related posts. TextWrangler was again the tool of choice, but, unfortunately, the find verb, unlike replace can only process files, not arbitrary strings. Thus, the performance penalty of writing to disk.12 13 The open for access command prevents a procession of windows from popping up, while, in line 72, TextWrangler performs its grep magic. In line 76, I set the status tag first, allowing the more pertinent related post tags to be listed first online.14
All that's left is to send the bookmark to the blog's account. Line 94 exhibits the joy of passing AppleScript variables to the shell. Note the single quotes around curl's url. AppleScript just would not accept escaped double quotes here.15 Also, the day after I got the script working, it started choking in the middle of the “to_blog” bookmarks (the “to_blog?” and “blogged” bookmarks were fine). Turns out I had included straight brackets in a description, and curl throws up an error upon encountering brackets and/or braces. Thankfully, turning globbing off avoids the issue, and neither solution caused any trouble.
Done with “to_blog”; onwards to the next!
Here's the downloadable version again. I've slightly changed the content and formatting of the comments, but the actual script does not differ from Friday's. Enjoy!
I'm using images instead of text for code as I have yet to set up syntax highlighting. ↩
Also, note the fun of extra escape characters in AppleScript. ↩
Currently the largest of these temporary files is 42 kilobytes. ↩
While a malicious actor could theoretically erase all my bookmarksa with knowledge of the token, I also run a nightly backup shell script.
a: The account password is required to sign in, so it wouldn't be possible to change anything else. ↩
And seems to prefer HFS+ style paths. Thankfully Cocoatech's Path Finder makes it super simple to grab paths in a variety of styles. ↩
Always a plus with AppleScript. ↩
Hence the very late night writing this script. ↩
TextWrangler shares its Big Brother's AppleScript dictionarya and understands its syntax modules. To complete the circle, one can find the module for Applescript here.
a: An overview can be found in Chapter 11 of Textwrangler's manual. ↩
And, let's say, slightly unorganized. ↩
ie: “to_blog”, “to_blog?”, and “blogged”. ↩
Using the “p:postTitle” syntax. ↩
Don't weep too much for me; I just upgrade to an SSD.a
a: A Crucial M500 960 GB. Ah, the glorious open range of pristine storage. ↩
Again, we get to see the shell's and AppleScript's lovely differing path syntax preferences. ↩
Line 82 inserts the all important “+” between tags. A lesson for me to always RTFM. It took me far too long to figure that out at 3am. ↩
My (uneducated) guess is it got confused with the plethora of quotes already in the line. ↩
Apologies for the day late update. Still trying to catch up from all the traveling. Looks like it will probably be a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday posting schedule this week.
As I mentioned in my last post, I've enabled Privacy Lock on my personal Pinboard account and written an AppleScript to sync blogging source links to the ReadingGeorgeFox account. The script is available for download.1 I'm still upstate so we'll have to wait until Monday for a full account and description. I've commented the script pretty thoroughly if you'd like to use it in the meantime.
No promises or warranties attached to it, of course. ↩
Sorry for the late post. Turns out a 340 mile round-trip drive from Salem to Poughkeepsie and back is not conducive to writing in-depth the next day. Anyways, onto the preview!
Blogging and the Anti-Social Bookmarker — A return to tech for those bored of politics and art. Ever since Maciej enabled Privacy Lock, I've set my personal Pinboard to be completely private. I'm not particularly interested in sharing all my personal interests1. However, after starting Reading George Fox, I figured it would be helpful2 to provide an archive of my sources; hence the pinboard.in link on the side.
Now, who wants to manage two different bookmarking accounts? Certainly not lazy old me. I've cobbled together a small AppleScript and bash system to automate transferring links from the personal account to the blog's. This will be the story of that journey.3
One Size Fits All — On the Magnum Edition of Lovecast 356, Dan chats with Dr. Joye Swan about condom use and magical monogamy thinking. While Dr. Swan has done some excellent research on the STI/HIV risks of serial monogamy and partner infidelity, her advice for “the re-education we have to go through” is far too dogmatic and narrow minded. She casually dismisses Dan's suggestion of open and honest monogam-ish relationships, and, in its stead, urges the frankly unrealistic goal of all people always using condoms, even within truly long term relationships (say five-plus years).
This argument seems ripe for critique, as does another study she mentions: one that “proves” condom use does not affect pleasure during intercourse. I've requested the article via Inter-Library Loan—I don't want to prejudge too much—but Dr. Swan failure to mention that the makers of Trojan Condoms funded the study does not reassure me.
Groundhog's Day: A Friendly Film — Failing to escape Salem4 over the last couple days reminded me of this classic movie. I've seen Buddhist perspectives, but I'm not aware of any Quaker interpretations. Of course, I have not done any research yet.
The Goal is to be Aware: If You Are a Heterosexual, Cisgendered, White Male; Yes, You Do Have Greater Responsibilities — A recent discussion about Adria Richards and PyCon reminded me how even self-identified allies can fail to see the margin's experience of the mainstream's behavior. Moreover, there's a tendency to idealize goals—a gender-blind society, for example—that will end up entrenching existing privilege. The first step is to wake up to how society's “normal”5 is not in any sense objective—it has been created by the powerful, even if only unconsciously so.
Friendly Beatings: What Quakerly Kink Would Look Like — Healthy BDSM beliefs are, perhaps surprisingly, similar to Quaker Advices for sound relationships. Mistress Matisse's “happy sadist dance”, seeing one's partner(s), and more.
And how much do you really want to know about my sexuala proclivities?
a: Though, as the fifth post suggests, I won't be staying away from such topics, just from my personal sex life. ↩
Plus, Maciej got an extra $10 from me. ↩
Ok, per xkcd, it will take me years to earn those hours back. So, an ulterior motivation might be getting some more justification for a very late night. ↩
Not at all a bad thing. ↩
Which, if you are a heterosexual, cisgendered, white male, is probably your definition as well. ↩
Now that I have a week of regular posting under my belt, I figured I’d record what my process is now and what I hope it to be going forward[1]. Right now, I’m rolling it old school—first draft is handwritten using pen and paper[2].
For all the Hoopla over technological methods to force you to focus on writing[3], nothing beats the simplicity of pen and paper. You have to switch to another device entirely to multitask. Moreover, it really does force you to slow down; I can type roughly twice as fast as I can write. Lastly, our consciousness and intelligence is distributed throughout our body[4]: our brains actually work differently using pen and paper than it does with keys and screen.
Next step is typing the post into Drafts—a step up in complexity, but still using a single focus device. I revise as I go, also expanding sections left rough in the first draft. Relatively simple links, mostly those already in Pinboard and Pinbook, are also added.
Onwards to the truck of computing; Drafts sends the draft post to Dropbox and MultiMarkdown Composer prints it out[5] [6]. I give it a good read aloud, then head back to the computer for more polishing, finishing research, and adding the remaining links, notes, and images. Finally comes one or more rounds of printing, reading, and revising; from there, I journey onto mount WordPress and try to coerce the formatting such that I’m not driven too crazy[7].
We’ll see if I can pull it off, but I’d like to imitate the excellent Gin and Tacos’ Monday, Wednesday, Friday posting schedule. I did manage to build a one day buffer last week; Good Sense was finished on Monday, and I relaxed Tuesday night with it scheduled to go up automatically[8]. Maybe one day I’ll be an all-grown-up blogger and manage a buffer half the size of Howard Taylor Cartooning Machine. New comics have gone up seven days a week for thirteen years, two months without missing a single day.
After some insightful criticism from my brother, I realized I need to delve even further into copyright than I thought. Plus, Burning Our Seed Corn is the wrong metaphor—we’re actually just locking up all the new seeds; the past remains as rich as ever. I also should make it clear I’m focusing on the artistic[9] realm. It’s what I know best, and adding software, etc will turn this unwieldy monster into an intractable beast.
The current plan is to spend the next few weeks researching the legislative history. I’ve already found good resources[10] from the 1976 revision. And, I’m a lucky bastard who lives in NYC, home of the most awesome public municipal library in the world[11]. As I wrote the first draft, I was outside in beautiful upstate New York and chatting with a NYPL librarian. Here’s the chat transcript for those who are interested.
We’ve arrived in the future!
This has nothing to do with going away for four days and needing a topic that doesn’t require much research. ↩
Using Uniball Vision Elite pens and Staples Legal Padsa. The choice of Champions.
a: I don’t have any affiliate links, so this isn’t a hard sell, just my office supply fetishes showing through. ↩
A variety of links coming soon. ↩
Think of a violinist whose fingers, to a certain event, know how to play separately from her brain. ↩
Ironically, I’m skipping this step on the current post, being at an awesome, but rustic art colony upstate. ↩
Once I really get into a grove of writing, I plan to indulge my super picky design OCD and try out Jekyll. One obsessiona at a time, however.
a: Yes, I am a huge nerd. ↩
Not the greatest accomplishment, but gotta celebrate the little victories. ↩
Defined broadly. Non-fiction writing to performance art. ↩
Will add them to Pinboard when I get back to NYC. ↩
NYPL is the third largest public library in the world—behind the British National and the Library of Congress. ↩
Post indeed coming later today.
-Bruce
In “Amazon has added Kurt Vonnegut to its 'official' fan fiction program”1, Rob Bricken argues the Kindle Words Program's inclusion of Vonnegut's work is an assault on all that is good and virtuous in the world of literature. That it “cannot end well;” that it will inevitably “…tarnish the works of one of America's greatest authors.” Sadly Bricken does not provide the mechanism by which this desecration will occur. Perhaps Amazon will rip out chapters from Slaughter House Five to replace them with fan written work; or they might publish an “undiscovered” Vonnegut manuscript; or they could even dig up Vonnegut's corpse to tar and feather it with pages of fan fiction. All are about equally likely.
Which leads to the question: how does the mere existence of tributes to an author's inspirational power damage the text's that already exist? Does Gnomeo and Juliet diminish the elegance of Shakespeare's original? Or does Cruel Intentions profane Les Liaisons dangereuses? Perhaps Phantom Menace's Coruscant reduces Asimov's Trantor?
Maybe the difference is that there is “no goddamn way anyone is going to write a story staring Kurt Vonnegut's characters as well as Vonnegut did.” Bricken is right, Vonnegut is a great author; however I hope we both agree that Shakespeare is at least a bit better. Would Bricken argue that Kurosawa's Ran or Verdi's Lear do not measure up to the original's greatness, or, if not that, demonstrate the fecundity of Shakespeare's text? Should Robbins, Bernstein, Laurents, and Sondheim have been prevented from creating West Side Story because it might not be as “good” as Romeo and Juliet?
Could the salient difference be that modern fan fiction will be uniquely bad, that “somebody [will] write about Billy Pilgrim turning out to be Gossip Girl, okay?” Letting aside the fact that ol' Gnomeo is probably a greater drop off than any fan fiction could be, why exactly does Bricken assume that Vonnegut fans will model their prose after Gossip Girl fan fiction rather than, say, Vonnegut? Even if some authors are fans of both, I'd bet they could clearly distinguish between the two style. Most importantly, no one is going to force him to read the bad stuff.
Bricken concludes that anything in the classic literature and fiction section should be off limits to fan fiction2. But who gets to decide what counts as “classic”? Should Iain Banks' science fiction be available while Iain M Banks' mainstream work not be? Stephen King has written some pretty pulpy novels; does that mean his work deserves less protection? Obviously this effort soon descends into absurdity. And, as referenced in the footnote above, there is no protection for works published before 1923, which leads to even more illogical conclusions. I guess Agatha Christie's third novel demands to be excluded while her first two meekly acquiesce to others' use.
I started the rant intending it to be a jumping off point into a broader discussion of copyright ethics. However, as I burrow more deeply into the its history, I discovered it would take much more than a single post. So to be continued3.
Scare Quotes in the original. ↩
Hurry up, someone get an injunction against Pride, and Prejudice, and Zombies! ↩
In the meantime, you can amuse yourself with this chart to help you determine a work's copyright status. ↩
Dan Savage’s continuing enthusiasm for Anthony Weiner is well intentioned, but ultimately mistaken and potentially counter-productive[1]. Dan is absolutely correct that we must fight for a world in which our sexual interests and mistakes do not disqualify us from employment or public service. How we behave[2] in the bedroom has little impact on how we work outside of it. Moreover, we have always been a kinky species; the Internet has just made our kinks public knowledge. In the long run, this is a wonderful news—it’s much harder to be judgmental about others’ quirks when your own are well known[3].
Weiner is just the wrong standard bearer for this fight. Dan often makes a distinction between having a kink[4] and how you communicate it. We look for good judgment in potential partners, and introducing yourself as a Furry, Coprophiliac, and Masochist on the first date usually[5] indicates that you aren’t the sharpest knife in the draw. Ol’ Anthony has taken a plethora of opportunities this summer to showcase his horrendous judgment. If you are premising your campaign as a redemptive journey, don’t engage in the behavior that fucked you in the first place. Especially when your wife will have to stand embarrassed by you again. Even if Huma is completely on boar with his sexting[6], those press conferences are not a fun experience to foist upon upon your wife. Moreover, it is indicative of how he will act as mayor—do we really want him embarrassing us by mocking a British reporter’s accent? Come on, most of us outgrew that impulse in junior high.
Furthermore, Weiner could have avoided this mess completely. He could have been a true standard bearer by embracing his kink—flatly stating that sexting is an accepted and private part of his marriage. This is New York City:
We cheered on Giuliani’s drag performances, we can tolerate a few dick pics. Or, if he didn’t want to be a positive role model, Weiner could have simply brushed off the past scandal and hired a professional sex worker. Purely visual and verbal sexual interaction is perfectly legal. Finding an escort who had a strong incentive to keep things private[7] would have been far smarter than finding another 22 year-old who has very few reasons not to seek out her fifteen minutes of fame[8].
Holding up an asshole with bad judgment as an exemplar of a tolerant future is just poor strategy. We’re not going to convince people to ignore past indiscretions if our examples continue to make fools of themselves. And it’s not as if Dan had to go far to find another candidate to support: why not fold in advocacy for sex worker rights with celebrating Elliot Spitzer?
I’m going to focus on Dan’s interest in normalization of embarrassing behavior and leave Weiner’s anti-bicycle and other anti-urban to the side. ↩
As long as it’s ethical and consensual. Someone who is an asshole to sexual partners is likely to be an asshole to you. ↩
Of course, it’s certainly not impossible, but to quote Paul Krugman, “…hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue and all that; every time a vile prejudice becomes socially unacceptable, our society gets a bit better.” ↩
Or profession, disability, etc ↩
This doesn’t necessarily apply to Fetlife, kink conventions, etc. ↩
And if she’s not, Weiner is a major asshole. ↩
Escorts who talks to the press about their clients soon have no clients. ↩
Anyone else surprised by the Sydney Leathers’ upcoming porno Weinergatea.
a Link is Safe for Work. ↩
