Wanna feel old?

geekdom, video
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The Ipod is ten years old this month. Metafilter remembers.

I only got an Ipod in 2007, a freebie I got at an ultimately failed job interview. With 2gb of storage it had enough room for a dozen or so albums, i.e. enough variety to last a medium length commute. Loved that thing, even if I’m no great Apple fan — something about them presenting locked down computer products as tools of freedom rubs me the wrong way — but sadly I lost it when it slipped out of a pocked while biking one day. Progress being what it is, that specialised piece of consumer electronics has been replaced by a more generalised bit of kit, my mobile phone which has the same amount of space and which cannot just hold music, but also books and movies undsoweiter.

Also ten years old today: Grand Theft Auto III. The first Grand Theft Auto was cool enough already, in all its old skool topdown 2d glory and controversial enough with its antisocial, crime glorifying violent gameplay, but once it all became 3d and the violence became up close and personal, whoa boy… Brilliant though.

Make booze boring for a safer Britain: support CAMRA

beer, Reefer Madness, UK politics
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Social anthropologist Kate Fox thinks the British are wrong in blaming alcohol for antisocial behaviour and that it’s in fact a cultural thing:

In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules. It does not cause us to say, “Oi, what you lookin’ at?” and start punching each other. Nor does it cause us to say, “Hey babe, fancy a shag?” and start groping each other.

[…]

We become more outspoken, more physically demonstrative, more flirtatious, and, given enough provocation, some (young males in particular) become aggressive. Quite specifically, those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol.

Which means that any attempt to limit booze related antisocial behaviour that focuses on alcohol as the evil spirit motivating this is counterproductive:

The drinkaware website, for example, warns young people that a mere three pints of beer (ie a perfectly normal evening out) “can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour”, that “you might start saying things you don’t mean and behaving out of character”, that alcohol is implicated in a high percentage of sexual offences and street crimes, and that the morning after “you may wonder what you did the night before”.

Instead, booze should be made into something a bit boring and stop being used as an excuse for people to be assholes:

I would like to see a complete change of focus, with all alcohol-education and awareness campaigns designed specifically to challenge these beliefs – to get across the message that a) alcohol does not cause disinhibition (aggressive, sexual or otherwise) and that b) even when you are drunk, you are in control of and have total responsibility for your actions and behaviour.

Alcohol education will have achieved its ultimate goal not when young people in this country are afraid of alcohol and avoid it because it is toxic and dangerous, but when they are frankly just a little bit bored by it, when they don’t need to be told not to binge-drink vodka shots, any more than they now need to be told not to swig down 15 double espressos in quick succession.

Which is why we should support CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, because how much more boring can booze be than if it’s drunk by middle aged, science fiction reading bearded folkies?

When America still read comics

Comix
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Here are some statistics to make any modern American comics publisher weep with envy. Coming from the transcripts of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency, which under the influence of Wertham and other moral crusaders looked at the evil influence comics supposedly had on the youth of America, this is part of the testimony of Mrs. Helen Meyer, vice president of the Dell Publishing Co:

Dell’s average comic sale is 800,000 copies per issue. Most crime and horror comic sales are under 250,000 copies.

Of the first 25 largest selling magazines on newsstands – this includes Ladies Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and so forth ─ 11 titles are Dell comics, with Walt Disney’s Donald Duck the leading newsstand seller. Some of these titles are: “Walt Disney’s Comics”; “Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny”; “Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse”; “Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Porky Pigs”; “Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker”; “Margie’s Little Lulu”; “Mom’s Tom and Jerry.”

The newsstand sales range from 950,000 to 1,996,570 on each of the above mentioned titles. I mean newsstands only and I am not including any subscriptions, and we have hundreds of thousands of subscriptions.

With the least amount of titles, or 15 percent of all titles published by the entire industry; Dell can account for a sale of approximately 32 percent, and we don’t publish a crime or horror comic.

[…]

We print approximately 30 million comics a month. We sell over 25 million.

I found this site following a long breadcrumb trail of blogs, which I won’t tire y’all with. The story of how Wertham destroyed comics is well known, if perhaps as much myth as fact by now, but every history I’ve read of this focuses on the artistic impact this had on the American comics scene, with the economic impacts only of secondary importance. So these histories do mention that many publishers folded in the aftermath of the Wertham controversies and adaptation of the Comics Code, but I haven’t yet found any that really goes into detail in the ways comics published itself changed, let alone a history that put this in the wider context of the changes in (magazine) publishing in the fifties. As show above, Dell, at the time America’s biggest comics publisher could expect to sell some 800,000 copies of any given title, but how and how much did Wertham influence these nubmers? Did the comics code really do in so many publishers or was there more going on? How does all this tie in with the collapse of the independent distribution system that also took place at the time, iirc?

Anybody can recommend any good book/website that attempts to answer these sort of questions?

When trolling becomes harassement

Feminism, Numpties
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Trolling is as old as the internet, but while most trolling is just annoying, it can often slide into harassement. For most bloggers this sort of thing hopefully is an incidental occurence at worst, but for certain groups it’s a daily routine: the death threats, rape threats, threats against your family, friends or pets it’s all to be expected if you’re a feminist blogger:

It’s a good week, these days, if I only get 15-20 emails from people telling me how much they think I should die, or how much they hope I get raped, or how much they hope my cat dies or I lose my job or fall in a hole or get shot by police or any number of things people seem to think it’s urgently important to tell me in their quest to get me to shut up. We are not talking about disagreements, about calls for intersectionality, about differing approaches, about political variance, about lively debate and discussion that sometimes turns acrimonious and damaging. We are talking about sustained campaigns of hate from people who believe that we are inhuman and should be silenced; the misogynists, the ‘men’s rights activists,’ the anti-reproductive rights movement, the extreme conservatives, the fundamentalists. The haters.

That’s what s. e. smith goes through each day and she’s not the only one, as confirmed by Skud on Geek Feminism, where she talks about the consequences for the people like her on the recieving end of such a torrent of hatred and vileness:

What you don’t see from the blog posts are the effect this had on people’s mental and physical health. I can’t speak for the other women targetted by Mikee, but I know that it affected my ability to concentrate, sleep, work, and socialise. Apologies for the TMI, but my gastro-intestinal system is also fairly sensitive to stress, so I was physically ill as well. I took several days of sick leave and went to the beach for an extended weekend, completely offline, to try and regain some equilibrium.

And the end result is that people stop blogging altogether, as s.e. smith knows:

And it works. I see it happening all the time; blogs go dark, or disappear entirely, or stop covering certain subjects. People hop pseudonyms and addresses, trusting that regular readers can find and follow them, trying to stay one step ahead.

As you know Bob, trolling largely originated on Usenet, where harassers had little choice but to make public threats, which was bad enough, but at least this meant others saw this harassement happening and could rally around the victims. With blogs, the only person that sees the rape “joke” is the blogger it’s aimed at. Which makes it easy for harassers to deny their actions and others to disbelieve the victims, making the harassement that much worse. This incidently, is not an exclusively online problem; much real world sexual, racial or other harassement is invisible to anybody but the perpetrator and their victim.

What’s to be done? For those of us whose gender/race/sexual orientation/usw. does not automatically makes us a target for harassement, the task is simple: to take the victims of harassement seriously when they’re reporting on it and then to support them in however they want to deal with it. If an harasser is called to task, we should not make excuses for them; if we see harassement happening, we should not stay silent. For y’all reading this, it’s of course unthinkable that either you or your friends would engage in such behaviour, but even so we should stay alert to the possibility.