well you know

we run things
things don't run we
that's a genuine Miley Cyrus lyric.
She didn't really write it, though. Seven (yes, really) people were needed to make that masterpiece of lyricism.
There's this debate with litfags about the story of Orpheus.
The story classically ends where he gets over his lost love by having sex with a lot of underage boys and it's believed now early Christians added that to discredit one of the more important myths in Greek Paganism.
I think it's clear that it's no myth and Orpheus still lives among us writing Miley Cyrus lyrics.
Oh right, what the fuck am I talking about?
Blogs.
Hope you're sitting comfortably and doing something else enjoyable while reading this drivel because we're opening with a bracing session of body politics.
I went to the gym yesterday and was already skinny before and now I'm getting fuckin' ripped so I am well equipped to handle this topic with sensitivity.

There's been another round of non-controversy over the use of mannequins with proportions approximating those of average women rather than unusually thin women. Which rather trivial news has been greeted with hysteria over the prospect that the mannequins might promote unhealthy lifestyles. 

I'd really like to take this article to a feminist in India and say "this is what feminists in America are worried about instead of the number of their supposed sisters raped and killed here every year"
I'm sure her insight would be interesting.

I find it completely baffling, this idea that even the most mildly positive image of anyone who isn't thin is going to destroy everybody's health. I personally am not convinced by the evidence for the view that being fat causes diabetes and heart disease and cancer, but I appreciate this is conventional wisdom. Even accepting that correlation, for one thing it seems like the only body shapes that don't provoke this health panic are those that are much thinner than the proportions recommended by those who are convinced that weight is the major factor in long-term health.

I'd only want those really swanky mannequins that don't even have human proportions--
like the impossibly thin waist and huge tits.
I'd also glue googly eyes on all of them.
Also I'd only have one pair of pants in a random color, style and size and once someone bought it I'd shutter the entire store for 15 minutes.
When someone bought it an air raid siren would go off.

And for a second thing, vaguely positive images of non-thin people don't cause people to gain weight and most certainly don't cause serious long-term health conditions. And we're talking really tiny amounts of positivity: a plastic statue of a woman standing in a shop window and wearing fashionable clothes is hardly an aspirational role model. I am incapable of imagining a woman deciding, oh, they have mannequins of about my body type in the window of Debenhams, I won't bother doing any more exercise or maintaining a healthy diet any more.

Remember when everyone was pitching a bitch about Abercrombie and Fitch saying it didn't want to sell clothes to fat people or nerds?
I feel they really missed their mark.
It's a brilliant marketing strategy but it's directed at the wrong market.
Teenagers are traditionally the ones who shop at Abercrombie and Fitch and they're also at the height of their 3edgy5me must be different phase and the best way they perceive to do that is by being extra accepting so that means being accepting of fat nerds and homosexuals.
If you want that marketing strategy to work make sure you sell primarily to white 20 something women.
Trademark like one pattern and put it on yoga pants and make sure it matches with beige and brown then pay like 50 hip-looking, hot models to wear them in NYC and LA for a week.
Then just sit your ass down and count your fat motherfucking stacks you greedy swine.
This type of thinking is exactly how I make money on the stock market, incidentally.
Here's my market research:
"that's an interesting name, what do they do?"
If I like what they do I go to their corporate website. If their mission statement sounds evil I check the news. If I can find a story where they're doing something I'd do I invest 100% of my money.
If I can second guess them I keep looking.
This is why I am 18% growth and really only play two to three times a week during lunch or in between bouts of 16 year old punks asking me ridiculous questions.
If I was actually a full time day trader or, hell, invested my full attention into it for an hour?
Watch the fuck out.
Nothing more heartbreaking than to see a good angle only to find the company is owned by like a chain of 90 companies and you just have to invest in Viacom or, even worse, they're private.

 I was going to post this when I had three milestones clustered together: a year of running, a hundred runs, and 200 miles total. But I was going through a really bad patch and I just felt too discouraged. Now things are going a bit better, but I'm still finding it hard going and feel I've lost ground. 

>been seriously exercising for about 3 months
>over 100 miles run
m8

So I started the Couch to 5K beginners' running programme at the end of September last year. It went really well; each successive week the workouts got enough harder that I was challenging myself but not impossible so that I felt like giving up.

Enough harder.
Do you have a couch to basic English proficiency program?
FUCKIN' ZING.

And I got through the programme (it took me I think 12 weeks rather than 9, but that's no big deal), and by the end of it I could comfortably run for half an hour without stopping. Slowly, but considering that even one minute of running felt daunting at the beginning, that felt a big accomplishment. 

Time to start your marine PFTs then.
I still couldn't join the marines due to my abysmal mile time.
I don't understand. I went from noodle arm to being about to do 20 pull ups without any real trouble but my run time has barely improved.
Not that I'm planning on joining the marines but I figure they have to shoot people for a living so they probably know a thing or two about not being a pussy and I just wonder why my progress is so uneven.

I definitely like running better than generic cardio.

>running better than generic cardio
>running is generic cardio
-
anything that gets your heart rate up is cardio.
The way 99% of meatheads will advise you to do this is running.

Partly because it's such a basic thing, I can get a fairly objective feel for how I'm improving without worrying about things like the exact machine settings. Partly because at least having the potential to run outdoors sometimes makes it less boring, I can actually go somewhere rather than being on a machine. This also means that I can just put on some trainers and leggings and run, I don't have to faff around going to the gym, getting changed, remembering my washing things etc. Of course, the down side of this is that sometimes the weather drives me indoors; I don't know if I should maybe go back to just switching around cardio things like ellipticals, bikes and rowing machines when I do have to be in the gym, because at least that would be a bit more varied. 

>you have a rowing machine
>not using it
IT'S LIKE YOU NEVER WANT TO GO SUPER SAIYAN.

On a good day, I come close to enjoying a run, though good days are still the exception rather than the rule.

You're not running fast enough, then.

In any case I'll take less hateful, because it's a lot more possible to motivate myself to do exercise when it's only mildly unpleasant rather than both unpleasant and boring. 

>want your exercise to be less hateful
Wow no wonder you've made like no progress.
The human body evolved in some of the harshest conditions on this, an already violent, planet. If you want true fitness you can't really afford to be anything less than a ball of incandescent hate and fury.
I should write motivational tapes for Warhammer nerds.
If I heard that in middle school instead of the typical NO PAIN, NO GAIN crap I might have given three fucks about four fucks.

I think one of the reasons that C25K worked well for me was that I got into the habit of running three times a week. I had to be quite strict with myself to make that happen, but aiming for three and falling short was was definitely getting me more exercise than aiming for twice a week and falling short. I also gave myself permission that on days I ran, I didn't have to do any other exercise. 

My routine starts with running.
Then there's stuff after it.
No fail.

So my brother (here known as Screwy) is a sessional teacher in a university. He decided, on the advice of a trans friend, that he would include asking for preferred pronouns during the intros in the first class of term. However, one fresher in his class, whom Screwy read as trans but who isn't out, was made visibly uncomfortable by this. This student later wrote in Screwy's teaching evaluation that this exercise could potentially out them, and respectfully requested that Screwy should not do that again.

As a result, Screwy feels really bad because his good intentions of making his class a safe space for people with diverse gender expressions backfired and actually made one of his students directly unsafe.

"Fuckers are out in force" would be my reaction.

i haz a pedagogy!

Oh good you're trusted to instruct people.
Fills me with confidence.

Somebody mentioned in one of the introductory sessions that whatever else the course achieved, it would turn you into a bad student. That turned out to be absolutely prophetic. I skipped the reading and turned up to class unprepared, I gossipped or daydreamed instead of working on group exercises, I whooped and punched the air when class was cancelled.

Sounds like how I got through my last year of college.
I bought a book to use as a prop.
Proof I owned it.
I never even opened it.
I'll never forget the class where we had to grade each other for "practice" and my response to this was "let's all just give each other an A" and one punk motherfucker said "I'm going to take this seriously."
I think something about the look in my eye convinced him I was serious when I said "then I want to grade last and I will give you exactly what you gave me."
If we're playing a game of GPA chicken I think I can take the guy in a sweater vest and bow tie.

Thing is, I was a bad student partly because for the first time in my academic career I genuinely had more important things to do than get high marks in a particular course. 

One time I had to walk hand in hand out to the parking lot with a class.
This was in college.
I am dead
fucking
serious
I tried to sandwich myself between the two hot Korean exchange students but no dice. I did get between one of them and a blind girl though so that was all right. What were we doing in the parking lot?
Checking our fucking privilege.
I swear to fuck I am not making this up.
I think the problem teachers run into talking to me is unless you literally taught in a prison and went to college in fucking Narnia you're not beating the insane shit I've seen and done.
This was somehow supposed to prepare me for homeless children high on PCP. I feel like if they had just played this while pointing at me it would have prepared me better.
YOU BETTER FEEL LIKE THIS ON THE INSIDE OR YOU'RE NOT GOING TO MAKE IT THROUGH.
And here I am.

Another reason I was a bad student was because I actually struggled with the academic material. Lots of people look at someone like me who typically achieves high marks in everything and imagine it's completely effortless.

>struggling with pedagogy
more like struggling to stay conscious am I right?
This doesn't make you a bad student. It makes you bad at tolerating bullshit. Any class that outright tells you "you'll be a bad student by the time you're done" is full of shit by definition.
Really?
Because before now I was an honors student. Is it me or is it you at that point?

Which is always really annoying to me, because I've never coasted on my innate ability, I've always worked really hard in every academic setting (until this course). But there's a difference between putting in lots of time and effort, and as a result fully understanding the material and being able to do well at it, and putting in lots of time and effort and still not really getting it. 

That's because it's engineered to not be understood. It's like one of those Zen riddles. T
wo hands clap and there is a sound.
What is the sound of one hand? It's like that only stretched out over 40 pages and filled half with made up words and the other half with  the douchiest words you've ever heard strung together in your entire life.

kaberett is absolutely right to point out that social science isn't any more jargon-heavy than any other field of study. But my problem was not that I didn't know the definitions of words, as that I didn't really understand the concepts the terms (very often words with common English meanings entirely unrelated to their technical ones) were referring to. I'm afraid that if this Higher Ed teaching course had been my only exposure, it would have confirmed my prejudices that social sciences are mostly wishy-washy and people making stuff up without any evidence and using lots of long words to make their opinions sound respectable.

Nope that's the social sciences.

For one thing, that helped me to overcome my prejudices; the "problem" with social science is nothing more than Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of natural science is crap too, it's using long words to justify existing opinions and prejudices, it's based on experiments which assume their conclusions rather than properly falsifying hypotheses with rigorous controls. But because I am completely embedded in the biological science world, I can filter out all the mediocre stuff and I basically only notice the really well-supported models. I still do find it difficult to connect to "theory" as opposed to what I think of as empirical work, but I am much more aware now of good research going on in social sciences and I'm starting to get the hang of where some of the theory comes from. 

I did a study for my student teaching class that said if you don't study you won't pass the test.
I had to scrap the experiment because I had no control. No one actually studied for the test.
It actually turned into this tortured experiment in perception vs. reality.
I'm pretty sure I ended up concluding I couldn't actually prove any of my students were real.
I guess I should be thankful because frankly it's been an issue I've been grappling with ever since in the back of my mind.
What is real?
What am I, even?
WOW MAN.

Some friends of mine have a young baby who is just about approaching the age where the NHS starts its vaccination schedule. They've been reading anti-vax stuff on the internet and it's scaring them. 

>being against vaccinations
>anno domini 2013
I guess the jar of leeches and the balance of the humors works just as well, then.

My friends are not completely convinced because they say that the pharmaceutical industry is motivated by profit rather than health.

No one hates the pharmaceutical industry more than me.
They are in the business of selling health, though. If what they sold didn't work they wouldn't be in business.
I'm not saying it works well or even fixes the problem but it has to at least be partially efficacious.

They are aware of stories of negative trial results being suppressed, of contaminated vaccines and of testing unsafe vaccines on vulnerable populations without proper consent.

And I store nuclear waste in a Coke bottling factory in EVE Online.
If you want cheap crap some sacrifices have to made.

There's been a lot of virtual ink spilled on the snobbery and sexism that permeates which kinds of video games are taken seriously. I think where I'm at is that actually, the industry has woken up to the fact that they can make serious money out of casual games, and it hasn't necessarily made my life as a casual gamer better (even though I am reasonably willing to spend money on games I enjoy). 

Every girl can now play her fucking Candy Crush for 5 minutes a day but I still struggle to find a game that can't be beaten in 12 hours.
WELCOME TO THE EQUALITY OF GAMING.
Ready for a fucking essay on why she's a casual gamer?
No?
Well too fucking bad because it's coming.

I am almost totally uninterested in first person shooters or any sort of game where the aim is to run around the world killing enemies. Those make up, of course, most of the headline games! And yes, I know some of them are really good, beautiful graphics, detailed world-building, interesting and original missions. 

You know some of them are really good, have beautiful graphics, detailed world building, etc etc?
Can you list them?
Because I sure don't know any like that.
Just brown and bloom in the desert of brown people and vague gun metal.

But I can't be bothered to invest dozens of hours in a game in order to find out what happens next in the plot. I would rather read a book, which takes me 10 hours or less, and which I can do more or less anywhere without needing complicated hardware. And if I want to look at pretty things and admire excellent storytelling in a more passive way, I would rather watch a film (which takes 2-3 hours) than play a game. 

Sounds like you might want to read a book or watch a movie, then.
You don't have to fuck up my major form of entertainment just because you weren't included in a hobby you clearly have no interest in anyway.

I've quite often acquired cutting-edge games when they seem to be more plot or exploration driven and less explosion / shooting driven, but I still have the problem that I can't be bothered to learn the skills needed to control my character or put the time in to actually play through the game. Things like Myst, Baldur's Gate, Black & White, Oblivion: over the years I've never been able to stick to them long enough to get past being useless and incompetent and actually start having fun.

YOU COULDN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO CONTROL MYST?
YOU CLICKED WHERE YOU WANTED TO GO AND IT HAPPENED.
THERE WAS LITERALLY NOTHING THREATENING YOU IN THAT GAME.
Also are you sure you played these games because if you tried to pick a group of games with less in common control wise than Myst, Baldur's Gate, Black & White and Oblivion you'd be having problems.

There are precisely two games I have actually enjoyed enough to spend time learning a complex set of skills to be able to play. One is Civilization II, which manages to combine flow state (managing resources in each of my cities in turn) with making decisions which actually take thought and strategy.

Until you realize the quirky AI and exploit it like a motherfucker.

And I think Terraria is turning out to be a second such game. I play it on softcore (which basically means that dying is an inconvenience), and I like the combination of simple repetitive stuff like fighting, with the brain-requiring bits of exploring and building. 

>Terraria
>brain power
WOW.

So the obvious reason I prefer casual games over "serious" games is that I want something that gives me 5 minutes or half an hour of flow state, not something that requires serious investment of time and brain power. But there's a second reason too, which I think boils down to a difference in approach or attitude. Serious games require you to manage split second timing and pixel perfect pointing to avoid DEATH. 

Not really.
I mean some games sure but most are a mix of strategy and coordination. If you're seriously going down to the wire like that then you're probably doing something wrong.
Also so what? Some people enjoy competition.
This is like people whining about IVs and EVs in Pokemon.
That's what competitive battlers do. If you don't like it prepare to be at a disadvantage. Don't expect everyone to bend over backwards because you don't like to sit and breed Pokemon for a few hours.
I'm glad IVs are still in Pokemon. Nintendo stood the fuck up and told whiners to go screw.
They made it manageable, granted (and thank fuck) but it's still an important element to the game.

Casual games kind of give you the benefit of the doubt, often giving you credit if you're nearly right, they tend to default to "yay, you win" any time the outcome is marginal.

IF I NEEDED PROOF OF HOW AWESOME I WAS I'D READ MY OWN BLOG.
OTHERWISE I'D LIKE A CHALLENGE.

And also, in serious games, your reward for doing well is very often stuff that is simply not rewarding for my brain. In-game money or high score points, meh. And all too often your reward in serious games is... sexy women. "Sexy" as in scantily clad with tiny waists and pneumatic breasts and a sort of vaguely soft-pornish "please abuse me" attitude. 

I have never in my fucking life played a video game where the reward was a woman outside of Mario.
You know, Princess Peach?
The one with so much clothing on she's wearing gloves in the desert and the only sex happening is if you can somehow interpret "baking a cake" as "fucking"?
There might be some sort of dating side quest or dealing with white women as a matter of getting to the part where you get to kill heretics and aliens but in general the end result isn't women.

Even though I'm attracted to women in principle, that particular style of sexy I find a complete and utter turn-off, and honestly when I'm playing computer games I'm not looking for sexual thrills anyway.

Soooo let me see if I understand this correctly:
you don't like active entertainment
you don't like being challenged
you don't like spending a great deal of time figuring stuff out
you don't like conflict
clearly video games are the hobby for you, then!
I hate the feeling of chalk and I can't draw worth a goddamn and I can't be assed to practice.
Should I pick up chalk portraiture?

Conversely, in casual games, your reward for doing well is often cuteness. Playing a little fanfare or displaying a colourful animation or giving me achievement badges and medals are much much better at pushing the reward buttons in my brain than just racking up a bigger number. And little cartoonish cute creatures make me smile, whereas sexy women making kissyface just makes me feel vaguely dispirited or reminds me forcefully that I'm not the intended audience. 

SO MAYBE FIND A NEW HOBBY.
JESUS CHRIST.
Also she may be dressing this up as "I like easy things" but I'm really reading this as "women can't handle honest competition and only like shiny, colorful distractions and vapid, shallow, meaningless content" but maybe that's just my rampant misogyny showing.
I mean sure video games are a waste of time (like pretty much everything in life) but at least good games you can claim shit like "well most people couldn't beat that."

Literal unpopular opinions

I have some unpopular opinions but let's match and see who is more far afield.

Israel is a legitimate state, both politically and in the specific sense of existing as a constitutionally Jewish and Zionist state.

Israel is not a legitimate state but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. If the Palestinians couldn't keep their shit together then that's sour grapes.
They're both assholes, though.

Islam is an excellent religion and one of the crowning achievements of human civilization. 

Backwards, barbaric drivel and the crowing jewel in the decadent and primitive Abrahamic religion crown.

There should be fewer abortions. 

I think most people agree all babies should be wanted and loved.
That's not really a controversial opinion.
The problem is that is not reality.
How are we doing so far?
Who is more controversial?
I'm not even trying to be edgy, here. These are genuine opinions I hold.

It's often better to vote Conservative than Labour. 

No one cares about British politics--
Not even British people, seemingly, as they're wrapped up in ours more often than not--

Alternative medicine is a good thing if it makes people feel better, even if its claimed mechanism of action goes against the current scientific consensus. 

This is where I'll lose ground, I think. Alternative medicine is full of shit and feeling better isn't necessarily being better.

We should actively encourage immigration into this country, and possibly remove immigration restrictions altogether. 

And here I'll gain some ground (against the typical Dreamwidth crowd, anyway): immigrants should only be allowed in if they have a useful skill or are college educated.

It's sometimes acceptable for parents to smack their children as a punishment. 

No it isn't. It only teaches children violence is a solution when they don't know how to deal with an issue.
While literally true (sometimes violence is the only acceptable solution) that's not really a lesson I believe needs impressed upon a 4 year old.
Your controversial opinions are boring.
Uhhhh fuck blogs.
Fuck the internet.
The song of the now.
Have we had this one before?
FUCK FEATURES.