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wshaffer

September 2021

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From Gawker in response to some silly people trying to make a flap over a J. Crew ad featuring a little boy wearing pink toenail polish.


For every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable. For every boy who is burdened with the constant expectation of knowing everything, there is a girl tired of people not trusting her intelligence. For every girl who is tired of being called over-sensitive, there is a boy who fears to be gentle, to weep. For every boy for whom competition is the only way to prove his masculinity, there is a girl who is called unfeminine when she competes. For every girl who throws out her E-Z-Bake oven, there is a boy who wishes to find one. For every boy struggling not to let advertising dictate his desires, there is a girl facing the ad industry's attacks on her self-esteem. For every girl who takes a step toward her liberation, there is a boy who finds the way to freedom a little easier.
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And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest.


--Charlie Brooker, on the BNP.
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The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.


---Dorothy Parker
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"But you can't just lose your neutrons! They're part of you!"
-Jack Harkness, Torchwood: Lost Souls

There may be actors who can deliver that line with total conviction. John Barrowman gave it a good go, but I think it didn't quite work.
"See, Daniel, this is why I like having dinner with your parents. Because where else would I be discussing how to sex an M&M?"

---Me

(We were discussing a new M&Ms candy commercial that features male and female M&Ms. Gendered M&Ms are a bit problematic, because it's not as if a blob of chocolate in a crunch candy shell has a lot of scope for secondary sexual characteristics. In the commercials, female M&Ms are identified by eyelashes. Which implies that with just a little mascara...)
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Is there a word for the shock you experience when you're reading something, and come across a bit that you've known for years, but you had no idea came from the work you were reading?

For example, I had no idea that this came from Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta:

Fornication? But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.


Reading Marlowe is fascinating, especially reading his plays chronologically. After reading Tamburlane the Great, I'd have been tempted to say that Marlowe was a hell of a poet, but not much of a dramatist. The Jew of Malta turns that on its head - there's very little in it that you'd want to quote for the beauty of the language (though some of it is wickedly funny - see above), but it's compelling dramatically. Also ragingly anti-Semitic, though Catholics and Muslims come in for a pretty good kicking as well.

If I were a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, I might speculate that the plays of Christopher Marlowe were not written by him, but by someone of the same name.
From some instructions on an internal engineering wiki:
"If you haven't already done so, create one or more changes via 'p4 change' that contains the files you would like to use for your build. If you don't know how to do this, ask your office mate. If neither of you knows, use Google. If you still can't figure it out, I really don't think anything I can say here can help you."

In addition to gratifying that part of me that's occasionally tempted to slip the sentence, "If you have to ask, you'll never know," into an FAQ, I'm struck by the author's instinctive understanding of how people seek technical information: ask a friend, ask Google, but consult the perfectly good documentation for the software in question? No, that would be weird!
"Apparently, the way to a woman's heart is through her distributor cap."

---me, explaining why I like my mechanic
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From the Big Finish audio play, The Dark Husband:

Hex: Sounds like fun.
Ace: What, unpleasantness, fear, boredom, danger, and weird alien creatures sounds like fun?
Hex: Yeah. It's not that different to nursing, really.