Thanks for the comments, friends

I'm getting so popular, holy shit-- two (or three, I dunno) entries ago: another comment.
Can't keep me down.
Anyway here's some cunt.

Fired up the Wii last night in a fit of boredom, figuring I'd finish Skyward Sword since I bought the Wii for it.

Saw Link standing in the water temple and remembered why I quit in the first place, and put in Twilight Princess instead.

Water temples, man. What is it about the water temple in every game? It's not even the puzzle. I got stuck on that stupid skeleton guy at the bottom of some sort of shaft and I don't feel like fighting him again because he kept kicking my ass. Not a boss. Just some enemy dude.

Wow.
Getting stuck in a Zelda game over combat.
They're not hard games, you know.

Chrome is telling me I can't go to gmail because "The site's security certificate is signed using a weak signature algorithm!"

Which, okay, funny, Google is angry with its own security certificate. But then I open up Firefox and cruise LJ and it pops open a new tab because Facebook wants me to do an anon survey.

...I don't have a Facebook. Chrome on my Mac doesn't have any problems opening gmail.

Ugh. It's like every time I turn around there's something new going hinky with my PC.

HURRRRRRR
URURRRRRURURURURURRRRR

I don't know if there's a legit problem or it's just LJ being gross like it sometimes is, since none of my scanners picked up anything nasty aside from a few tracking cookies.

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

So instead of studying for the bar, I played ME3 and finished it. 

Wow, lawyer and Mass Effect fan.
And your blog is entitled "Feminist Popcorn".
You've just got it going on all the way around.
Holy shit.
This blog is boring as fuck. I can't believe how many entries I've skipped over and I haven't even had a thought about it. Wow, posts about your fish tank this is really riveting shit!

But srsly, his. In an article about the game. Way to overlook 50% of the human population (or 20% of Sheps, as of ME2). I also got used to law school, where a lot of books seem to use the neutral "she" instead of "he." Seeing "he" is pretty jarring, especially when I've got 120+ hours invested in "she."

>She
>neutral
>2012
No, sorry.
You have only yourself to blame for this development, FEMINIST Popcorn.

Seriously, is a singular they all that hard to come by?

English doesn't have one.
I'd expect a lawyer to know this.
I still use "she" because I give not one fuck but it even sounds antiquated to me and I'm using it.
It's either she, he (which would be grammatically incorrect), they (even worse) or he/she (nope).
It's like one of those grammar rules that hasn't been updated yet but really needs updating but no one wants to deal with the ramifications of adding an entire pronoun class that hasn't existed in English.

A post on abstinence-only education and the, frankly, baffling belief that waiting until marriage means that sex is the reason to get married dredged up this memory for me.

zzzzzzzzzzz--

I was a teenager-- high school, anywhere between 14 and 19, old enough to be perturbed but young enough to be driven around by my mother. I don't know how we reached the topic, but I suggested that cohabiting before marriage was a good idea because how else will you know if you're compatible? Like, what if you're neat and they're a slob? That's totally grounds for divorce! Clearly the solution is to find these things out beforehand.

Recent research indicates marriage is more likely to end in divorce if you cohabit (or "live together" if you're feeling less pretentious).
Further research indicates your marriage is 500% less likely to end in divorce if you marry a brown girl while being a white man.
It also posts a measly 4% decrease if you marry an Asian woman although I suspect the primary reason for that is because you dumb fucks are doing it way wrong and marrying what wisemen call ABCs (America Born Chinese). I suspect if the average idiot did it properly that combo would be posting similar numbers.
What I'm trying to say is science isn't finding anything a wiseman doesn't already know.

My mother disagreed, and told me "why would you buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" Meaning, why would a man buy a cow. A woman would buy the cow, because women think differently from men.

I'll never forget that moment, because it shot straight from my ears to my gut and coiled low in my belly like molten lead. 

It's a metaphor.

1) I was a cow.
2) Men only want me because of sex.
3) If I am to marry, I must entrap a man with the power of my pussy.
4) If they can get the sex without being coerced into marriage, they will never marry me.

Ergo, men are scum.

It means a comparison without using "like" or "as".
She was just comparing you to a cow.
She wasn't calling you a cow, Jesus.

In retrospect, it makes me wonder: who is this cow roaming around that you can milk? Who owns her? Why do they let you milk their cow for free? Why wouldn't you want to buy the cow and feed it grass so you can sell the milk as organic at a huge mark-up? Also wouldn't the cow already have a kid if she's producing milk, rendering the whole "wait until marriage" thing moot anyway? Who wants to marry a cow?

WHY AM I A COW.

... So there you have it?
Women.

I finished my paper on threats against women online and the Virginia v. Black standard, and double-checked my citations. Since it's about threats I pulled on my long Internet memory to quote quite a lot of threatening language, and just when I clicked a link on Feministe-- BAM my computer goes haywire. It wants to run reinstall.exe and won't let me do squat. So I reboot and am asked, in the boring standard dialogue box I see a few times a week when Firefox crashes, if I want to scan my computer. Yeah whatever, stop messing with me, Windows.

Then I notice that all the errors are... wrong. "Hard drive speed reduced." "Ram slowed." Uuuuuh, what? Then I see the "buy now" button.

Awwwww fuck.

Long story short, my computer is out of commission until someone more computer savvy gets a look at it.

Reboot in safe mode with networking and run Malwarebytes you ignorant cunt.
This is the part that slays me about lawyers. So big and important until some actual work needs doing.
I say burn the lot of you.

None of the tips for fixing the System Scan malware work (i.e., I can't open safe mode).

You can't
"open"
safe mode.
Are you sure you know what you're doing?

Since I was barred from my game and my buddies were out for the afternoon, I went shopping for a chair. It didn't fit in my car, so the guy I've been talking to suggests: "maybe... you could get your husband to help?" I ignore that because how rude can you get and say, "I'll get it later." "Do you have a bigger car at home? Maybe your husband's?" "I don't have one." A bigger car or a husband. "Really?" "Really." and then a bit later "a pretty girl like you with a degree living alone? Where have all the men gone?" "I dunno, I don't swing that way."

I know he was scoping me out. I don't know why I am so irresistible to guys in retail.

Cooooooooool.

  I have a weird annoyance with the idea that humans are special in SFF for their boldness of spirit or whatever. 

SCIFI FANTASY GUYS DON'T WORRY I GOT YOUR LITFAG ACRONYMS COVERED.

They are the boldest, the most resilient, the most noble! In Mass Effect, it's their "genetic diversity."

Humanity suffered a population bottleneck that has left us with four major lineages. For the amount of time we've been on this planet, we are an incredibly non-diverse species as compared to others.

Oh want a scifi fantasy story where humanity isn't known for its youthful feel and dynamic view of the world?
You need only peer into the grim darkness of the far future.

We're not like cheetahs, which have such little genetic diversity that a case of the sniffles could wipe out the entire population, but as far as genetic diversity goes, we're a bunch of inbred cousins poised on the precipice of an epidemic or climate change. Yeah, we're adaptable. We're good survivors. This is because we're sapient tool-users, not due to some innate biology.

>not due to some innate biology
>the fact we are sapient is due to biology
your entire argument is undermined by a very glaring hole in your argument, esquire. 

The idea that humans are the most diverse species in the galaxy means that the other sapient races are facing down eradication at every turn. This year's outbreak of influenza? BAM! There goes an entire civilization. Like colony collapse among honey bees, the Tasmanian devil's contagious facial cancer, the bats being wiped out by a fungus-- all what happens when you don't have enough genetic diversity.

...
Assuming the aliens evolved in a similar setting to our own, of course.
Like the Eldar in Warhammer 40,000 have been around so long they've far evolved beyond fearing disease and the like and so therefore have become a very homogenous people.
There are reasons genetic diversity can go away and in fact we're starting to see it in our own species.
I guess I should cut you some slack because you're a lawyer, not an evolutionary biologist but then again neither am I yet I manage to open my mouth and not sound like a prattling twat.
Must be some sort of innate ability I have.

That's just the scientific problem. I see it a lot in fantasy with elves. "Humans are so adaptable, not like us old sticks in the mud!" Really? Really? Elves usually have magic and floating cities or other grand floaty architecture if they're living in trees, and you expect me to believe that elves didn't adapt?

...
The point is they didn't have to adapt--
because they had magic, you know?
Magic makes shit easier, like being able to shoot fire out of your hands?
You don't need to learn to make fire then.
Also are you seriously trying to make a scientific argument in a universe where magic exists?
"Wow the Warp in Warhammer is so unrealistic!"
WOW GEE YOU ARE SO RIGHT A REALM OF MAGIC IS UNREALISTIC.
YOU FOUND THE ONE PROBLEM WITH THE STORY OF WARHAMMER.

That Elfus erectus was putting up tree houses and zinging spells around before they had language? Yeah yeah, it's fantasy and elves didn't evolve.

Considering most the elves in the scifi and fantasy I've encountered were literally created by a deity that is still around to interact with mortals pretty much proves they didn't evolve.

 Whatever. I would think a society with grand magic would be way more adaptable than humans in the face of catastrophe-- in case of an earthquake I'll take the floating city above standing in a doorway any day (this ties in with my "magic is technology! Treat it like a technological innovation!" rant which I'm sure other people have touched on more eloquently than I could).

... Which is why the catastrophes that face elves is never something simple like an earthquake.
It's like the birth of Slaanesh or losing favor with the deity that created them or something.

If you have a sapient tool-user, chances are, they have most of the same quality humans have. And the more abstract the tool-use, the more adaptable they are: see bonobos versus sea otters. And on that score, humans are definitely not the most noble of possible other races. That honor would have to go to the bonobo, which domesticated itself and solves its problems with peace and love instead of murder. The very idea that we're the most noble is, frankly, depressing.

Yeah but when your choices in a game are humans, some kind of faggy elves who betray you at a moment's notice, some blue people with vagina noses or like green soccer hooligans it's pretty easy to pick out the side you're intended to root for.

Granted, a nebulous quality like "nobility" isn't something that can be quantified like genetic diversity, so it's just this grumble in the back of my head regarding world-building. I think it all mostly annoys me because it's an excuse to completely homogenize whatever other you're discussing, be they elves or aliens. They are all the same, they lack the spark of humanity. And that's just lazy.

That's because you're basically creating an alien species that has human-like qualities.
If you give elves all of the same qualities that make humans humans why not just make more humans?
By this point you're focused on superficial details like "oh they have pointy ears" and who gives a fuck then?

Perhaps one of the most amazing things about Mass Effect is realizing how many celestial objects are actually in the Milky Way. I feel pretty knowledgeable, I know a lot about space, but I never had any idea some of those things were in the Milky Way-- like the Horsehead Nebula.

>pretty knowledgeable about the Milky Way
>didn't know one of its hallmark features existed
No, cool.

When you learn about celestial objects you learn about things like "galaxies" and "nebulae" in such a way that, at least for me, lead one to believe that they're separate things. A galaxy is a spinny collection of stars and activity. A nebula is a floaty blob of gas.

... That's what you learned, maybe, but meanwhile I paid attention a bit in school and happen to know nebulae are often contained in galaxies.
The galaxy is a lot bigger than you seem to give it credit for.

Realizing that nebulae are bits of floaty gas inside galaxies turned my entire conception of space upside down. And I grew up on this sort of space-related edutainment. If you look for information on the Horsehead Nebula, it'll tell you that it's in Orion, but it doesn't say that Orion is in the Milky Way. This would make logical sense since we can see it with the naked eye, but again, that's not how we're taught about space-- especially since you can also see a band of the Milky Way, so clearly the things not in that band aren't in the Milky Way, right?

You're a moron.
Here, let me break this shit down for you:
space is vast.
So vast, in fact, that your pitiful concepts of distance and time are so inconsequential they're meaningless.
The Milky Way galaxy is home to so many fucking solar systems it'd make your head spin.
Whining about sexism--
whining about rape in a story without a TRIGGER WARNING--

OMG PRINCESS LUNA ON MLP.

The wait was so worth it.

My Little Pony.
Fuck off, entry over.