Month: November 2023

Oh, The Angry Women.

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I got a friend request from someone I had not heard from in some time, so we reconnected about a week ago. The posts were, for the most part, pretty interesting and I interacted a few times.

Today, she posted an image that said something along the lines of, “A working man comes home and makes dinner, and a working woman comes home and makes dinner.”

I was one of the first people to comment, and I simply said something along the lines of, “what sort of men are you hanging out with?” Thus began the female pile-on.

Now, let’s get something straight. I’m all about equity. People who know me know this. It’s not something I should have to defend, and it gets pretty old seeing women complain about men all the time when I am not responsible for the men that they are around or have experienced. They’re not responsible for the women I have experienced either. It works both ways.

What’s more, most women I know don’t gripe about men all the time or as abrasively. There are things we can joke and laugh about, but generally speaking they talk about specific people in their experience.

Speaking for myself, I have cooked for myself since I was 11. Through years of trial and error, I learned to cook some tasty meals for which I do have references. When in relationships, I never expected dinner to magically show up, I participated in the endeavor. This meme made me… upset. Most guys I have known over the years that I worked with either did their own cooking at home or participated somehow. The last time I was in the United States, one friend even showed another how to use an air fryer to make steaks and asparagus. Well, I think it was asparagus.

This idea that men don’t cook or clean or do their own laundry… yeah, I don’t really want to hear about it because I’m self-contained. I don’t need someone to do things for me, I have spent 4 decades doing it pretty much by myself.

Now if you look up a bit, you’ll see that I wrote ‘most guys I have known…’. That’s a qualifier. I don’t know every guy. So that’s where I was coming from and whether you like it or not, there are guys that are quite capable of doing things on their own and not demanding things from women. Most guys in my present circle of friends are not the men expecting dinner when they get home unless they make it. This ‘most’ thing, as well as ‘many’, get thrown around without qualifiers so much.

‘Most’ used without a qualifier gives 51% and 99.999% the same weight. Do you mean that it’s most of the people you know? Well, maybe you need to work on who you know. I would even bet that there are women out there with guy friends who can do all the things that they complain that men can’t do and, because they’re in the friend zone, the guys just let it pass on that off chance that the woman will be interested.

I’ve done that a few times. It’s pretty stupid so I have quit. In fact, the last time it happened I was moving and the woman – Debbie was her name – said, “You can’t move, you’re my backup plan!”. What? I’d made sure she knew I was interested, she always flirted just enough, and I was a bit smitten before I was smitten by that comment.

Does that mean all women friend zone good guys? No. Do I go making broad generalizations? No. Do I nod when I hear the same happening to another guy? You bet. In the romance department, I have the thousand yard stare. Yet none of those relationships defined how I viewed women as a group.

It’s hard to be an ally to women, which seems like some sort of ‘political’ requirement these days, when they keep posting shitty things about men as generalizations. When men did it, it was called sexism. Now that gets shouted down, but only if it’s about women.

Most women I know handle themselves quite well too. I’m not going to say that the people I know are completely independent, but they can take care of themselves without issue. When we offer each other help, it’s not because someone demanded it.

The point I was making was that there are clearly men she was unaware of. Before I figured myself out, I got myself into some really toxic relationships with women. I also got myself out of them, which ranged from mine fields to amicability.

Being short and without wealth certainly didn’t help matters, but I found that if that’s what they wanted that they should by all means have it because… why would I want to be in a relationship with someone who didn’t want me for who I was?

And this goes back to women bitching about men all the time, those that do. There’s nothing quite like watching women complain about men publicly (that post was public, by the way) and then complaining about not being able to find a guy. Well, maybe he saw your Facebook posts and decided that he didn’t need that.

I have absolutely no relationship advice to give because I have grown accustomed to taking care of myself. This is partly my fault because I did find myself attracted to women that were less than good for me, and they were attracted to me for much the same reason.

I will offer you that you should expect guys who aren’t douchebags to stand up for themselves. If you only know ‘misogynist pigs’, hey, maybe you should change that. There are good guys out there.

I’m not saying that I’m one of the good guys. I’m happy in my isolation, with boundaries I set and respecting other people’s boundaries. Sometimes I leave my socks on the floor and later on, I’m the one who picks them up. I have yet to remember why the hammer was on the bed. But c’mon, if you find yourself posting a bunch of generalizations about some particular gender, culture, race, etc, you might want to consider that you might not have it right.

You might just end up chasing the people away who don’t fit that generalization. You’re not changing minds, you’re alienating them, isolating yourself from the people who could change your mind and becoming a victim of your own communication.

Me? After a bit of back and forth with the pile-on of women, I just walked.

Quit hating on all men. We’re not all jerks, and those of us who have been around for a while are a bit tired of it. If you’re surrounded by jerks, move away from them. Do something different. The world is a bit place, there are guys who are jerks, but you know what? Women can be jerks too.

Much Ado About Samoan Agreement.

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I was sitting in a friend’s office – I seem to be doing that more frequently these days – when we started talking about what I had skimmed in the headlines. Something about this agreement being a sign of the Apocalypse or something.

Clearly, I’m joking, but maybe I’m not. I’m not invested in this particular conversation, but my friends are so it’s an academic exercise at best. They were fishing for what I thought about having children learn about what I can best describe as a new concept of sexuality and whether it should be taught in schools.

Whenever I hit a topic like this, I admit my biases up front because I generally don’t view things the same. In this case, I glanced at the headlines, laughed a little and moved on with my life because any agreements are because of trade, and the reason Trinidad and Tobago is not in as good a position to negotiate anything is because of the mismanagement of the government over the years. I’m not pointing at one administration or party. I’m pointing at both.

So for me, that summarized the issue well.

But my friend has kids, nieces and nephews that could be affected, and I did notice it in a few headlines I looked at in the store. Front page news, this, because homophobia is still pretty stylish in Trinidad and Tobago. Getting into shades of sexuality in a country where heterosexual men and women ‘wine’ at, on, or through each other might be easier except it’s, for some strange reason, not. Most people I know my stance on it: I. Don’t. Care.

And no, that doesn’t mean I condone or condemn anything. I keep my sexuality tidily locked up somewhere. I think it’s in the back behind my old jeans in the closet. I could go look for it, I suppose, but what I do know is that if your sex life doesn’t affect me, I don’t care. It’s not my business. You like your sex, that sex, that’s great. Once everyone is a consenting adult and you don’t feel this need to give me details, I’m great. I’ll congratulate you if you find someone you’re happy with, but I’m not interested in the dirty details.

Others, however, seem to care a lot about what other people do and want to control it, and this has caused people to stand up for themselves, which has in turn caused a bunch of hostility when at the core of it all it’s really about authoritarianism versus liberty. We’ll get back to that point.

This being Sunday, I decided to poke around about this ‘Samoan Agreement’.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Catholic News TT gave us, “Economic Carrots with Ideological Strings“. Archbishop Gordon is more overt with, “‘EU imposing ideology that is not ours’“, which was even echoed in Barbados. Other articles from Trinidad and Tobago seem to rehash the same thing.

Then I caught what the Prime Minister of St. Vincent said and he mentioned the 400 page document.

It struck me in reading all this uninteresting drivel. So I found the Samoan Agreement here, which links to the 403 page PDF of the Samoan Agreement. Strangely, at no point in the document itself do they call it the ‘Samoan Agreement’, which is kind of dumb. Yet, it is the Samoan Agreement, apparently.

It has nothing about abortions, homosexuality, etc. It talks a lot about human rights, it’s worded ambiguously enough that wherever a nation’s legislation and morality lands, it’s pretty simple. It requires no changes to the curriculum. Go search the document. If you find something, do something wonderful that no one has done yet: Cite it.

It may make babies be born naked, and we all know they have the right to be clothed at birth, but since this unlikely to be possible soon, I’d suggest we table it.

So now I’ll get back to that authoritarianism versus liberty thing again. Authoritarianism is blaming another for authoritarianism because authoritarianism loves the whole ‘us‘ and ‘them‘ argument. Authoritarianism is about doing what someone else wants, liberty is about doing what you want without impacting others.

From what I read, the Samoan Agreement simply says, “We agree to a standard of human rights which are necessarily ambiguous because no one can agree on them in practice.” Sex education? Sure, but it doesn’t specify a curriculum. It doesn’t really specify anything.

They’ll say, “Well, one day it could mean…” and maybe that’s true. But it is not this day. No one is being threatened by the agreement. In fact, religion shows up 4 times and they’re not telling people that they have to be of a certain religion.

Human Rights include the right to be properly informed. If you’re going to start a panic, at least cite where you got it from.

The Experiment

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I got into a conversation on Facebook. I don’t know where you folks were and why you didn’t talk me out of it, but here we are.

It started with this article in the New York Post: “New dating ‘phenomenon’ proves traditional relationships are over“. Well, that’s old news, it must be a slow news day. Relationships have changed, and I could get mired into a lot of details about that based on the strides we’ve made in women’s rights (though ladies have had a helluva setback recently), the simple socioeconomics of our world where a family could once survive on one person being gainfully employed, etc, etc.

What did we expect would happen? Those not in developed nations largely have a completely different view of the world, not unlike fish – it’s as alien to those in developed nations as that of fish.

Out of the blue, someone brought up the ‘population crisis in developed countries’. Wait, what? A decline in population isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s a crisis? It’s the first I’ve heard of. The vast majority of the global population don’t live in developed countries, and developed countries have had a noticeable decrease in middle income households. As the joke goes, the poor scare the middle income, the middle income scare the rich, and so on. The poor in a developed nation are generally better off than the poor in a less developed nation. It’s the way it is. This is the world as it is, whether we like it or not.

He went on to say that the problem was that the infrastructure couldn’t be supported if there was not a high enough birth rate. That’s sort of an immigration issue, is it not? If you don’t have enough people to do something, you import them – that’s how immigration has worked for millennia. So by not even acknowledging immigration… I began to get a feel for where the argument was from.

Birth rates are complicated. Death rates are also complicated. People tend to look at statistics of one and not the other, and they tend to look through the lenses of the way people shave the stats.

A decrease in birth rate in developed nations is hardly something that alarms me. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t alarm the majority of the people in the world, either, since they’re not in the developed nations.

Things normalize over time. Things fall apart. Things fall together. Managing all of that mess is hardly something anyone is good at because there are just too many variables, and one of the premises of life I have in the forefront is amazingly simple:

Life is an experiment on itself.

Revisiting A First Draft, And Flow.

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I was revisiting the first draft of a bit of future fantasy/science fiction I had written some month ago, and it just wasn’t feeling right. The flow seemed… stiff, here and there. This happens sometimes, in my experience, when you leave a bit of writing and come back to it, and you have a different… flow.

I don’t know what the technical term for it. I’m not formally trained in literature, which I do have some regrets about, but I also don’t like the idea of breaking down what an author does into infinitesimal bits because you don’t feel the flow. You get lost in details that really don’t matter as much as that flow.

Stephen King knows flow. I don’t know how he does it, but his most recent works are masterful with flow. I also like Stephen King because he can start with something inexplicable and weave it into a reality that is familiar to you. You find yourself just accepting some things. I do wonder how much he gets away with because his name is on the cover…

Douglas Adams, on the other hand – again, one of my favorite authors – has a clunky flow. You can feel it almost every time he got up from his keyboard and you don’t care because it’s a fun story and a fun exercise for a brain that has been in dire need of fun since the first brick was fired.

Of course, everyone may experience them differently, and that’s great.

But that’s what I am pondering today. Flow.

The Unattack.

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In watching how the world is changing around us, I remembered that there are some orcas playing with boats somewhere near Spain.

Everyone’s saying that the boats are being attacked, but with no expertise whatsoever to support me, I think it could just be playing.

Why? Well, if you check out the USA Today article on why orcas are attacking boats and sometimes sinking them, you’ll find lots of really interesting pictures.

This image, in particular, is very interesting (please open in a different tab). The keel of the boat, that pokey thing in the center – doesn’t that look a bit like it could be a dorsal fin? And the rudder, doesn’t that kind of look like a tail fin?

I’m not saying that this is what orcas see, but it’s hard to un-see it once you do. So what sort of creatures have a dorsal fin facing the bottom of the ocean? I know some fish float upside down when dead, but I don’t think that’s always true.

The attacks, however, happen when the boats are in motion, and generally speaking, dead creatures don’t move on their own as a boat would appear to – but then too, orcas have probably observed fish in nets or that have been hooked. In fact, in that same area, fishermen often throw hooks over the stern (that’s the back of the boat for non-sailors) which is also where rudders happen to be.

However, orcas do swim upside down.

…Orca sometimes swim upside down in order to target prey—by doing so, it can ensure prey cannot fight back when it turns itself back around.

The orca may also have been playing. Orca have been observed displaying playful behavior before, and approaching boats out of curiosity. Orca may swim upside down near boats in order to explore the area…

“Orca Swims Under Boat Belly Up in Incredible Close Encounter in Puget Sound“, Newsweek.com, July 21st 2022.

We talk to animals quite a bit – maybe more than we should, anthropomorphizing where maybe we shouldn’t. Communication, though, can be different from their end. Maybe they think the boat is an upside down creature that is playing?

It’s impossible to say, but I’m pretty sure it’s not an attack.

I’m also pretty sure it feels like an attack if you’re on the boat.

People do the above to each other every day, accidentally causing harm when trying to be playful. Maybe the answer is to let the orcas know that it hurts when they do that.

AI is Not A Muse(d).

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Image generated by Inspirobot.me

There’s been a lot said, written, and shoved in learning models without the permission of authors and artists to train artificial intelligence models.

Of course, artificial intelligence investors don’t want to pay for using copyrighted works. I’d wager in a legal sense one could make a case about fair use, and I must admit a bit of amusement at the conundrum that has been created in that regard.

Yet, when I’m stuck about writing something, I generally don’t turn to those AI models, which despite being accused of creative just have more access to data to draw a nexus from. What most people consider to be creative is almost always that. It’s how I like connecting seemingly unrelated topics.

AI is not a muse.

No, when I’m writing and I hit some kind of block, I generally go check out Inspirobot.me. It’s reminiscent of a silly program I wrote on an Apple IIe that simply spliced words and phrases together to form insults. As a teenager without many friends, I found this very amusing. When it began to get stale, I’d add more words and phrases.

Inspirobot does something similar in a technical sense, with some great imagery in the background – as above. Literature is a creation.

AI investors are trying to change that, as if all humanity has had to offer has already happened.

Silly investors.

The Saturday Phone Call.

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The phone rang.

Then, it rang again.

And again it rang.

I debated picking it up. I was busy procrastinating about which project I should procrastinate about, a relaxed frame of mind, as I studied the face of the rock from which there was that landslide.

The damned thing was still ringing.

The number wasn’t known to me. That would mean either the bank or the police or someone else I didn’t want to talk to. I collect numbers of people I talk to, and if you’re not on the list this is what happens. If you want to get on the list, you have to be of interest somehow.

Mentally, it’s a coin flip as to whether I answer because emotionally I just don’t like the ringing device very much.

Heads. I answered the phone.

“Hi, is this <your_name_here>?”

“Hi, who is this?”

“Hi, is this <your_name_here>?”

“Hi, who is this?”

“This is <insert name here> with <insert bank name here> bank.”

Friendly, I respond, “Oh, hi, how are you?”

This always throws them off. The disarming sincere query that twists the script. Will she fall for it?

“Oh, I’m fine! As you know, <insert bank name here> is doing a loan drive and…”

Oh good, she did!

“Oh, loans!”, I take over in a charming and sincere voice, “Those are the things where they give me money and I give them more money back, right?”

A sound of a suppressed laugh, so I continue, “That’s a fair summary, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Mr. Rampersad, that is!”, she responds, laughing through it.

“Well, I just don’t like or want anything right now where I’d be willing to do that, so thank you. Have a great day!”, finishing on a genuine and sincere note.

She responds sincerely in the same way.

She has a job to do, I cut to the quick, we both moved along with our Saturday, both a bit better for it. We both got a laugh, and at the expense of the 3rd party who wasn’t on the phone.

Unsimulated.

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Not long ago, a fellow writer and I were having coffee and he brought up that we live in these virtual worlds, akin to the stuff Elongated Musk (that’s what Elon is short for, right) has said – which is really a rehashing of various perspectives over the centuries.

The idea that this reality isn’t controlled by us makes us want to think it’s controlled by someone, I suppose. The idea that things could just happen is a bridge too far for many people.

Our brains give us the illusion of the physical world. In that regard we all live in a simulation, yes, but it’s not all the same simulation. There are illusions we agree upon – how we experience a color or a sound may be different than others experience it, which could explain why people have different favorite colors and types of music.

If it were a shared simulation, we’d have the same experience. We’d probably all have the same favorite color, as an oversimplification. What’s more, the way we view the world being influenced by so many variables means that any simulation would have to be powered toward an end, at some sort of cost.

Maybe this is where Douglas Adams got the idea about the Earth being a computer, but I think that had more to do with the Gaia Hypothesis and general silliness.

Saying the world is a simulation, that the galaxy is a simulation, is just another cop-out for those wanting an answer more than trying to come up with a better question, in my opinion.

That’s why we have deviants, and most of us are deviants by degree.

We live in a strange universe, ripe for investigation, but calling it a simulation seems amusing – as if someone has a power over it. Stop me if that sounds familiar.

To Be A God.

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A meme was making it’s way around social media and it asked about what deity you would like to be in a fantasy world. Well, that’s a fun one.

I posted something along the lines of being the God of Realistic Dreams. That’s a bit of a grey area though, so I decided on something else.

The God of Thoughtfulness.

Rewarding thoughtfulness seems like just allowing things to happen naturally. No need to intervene. No need for prayers, animal sacrifices, human sacrifices, vegetable sacrifices or even vegan sacrifices for that matter. The simple act of thinking things through should be it’s own way to practice worshiping the God of Thoughtfulness.

Hands free deity. If you’re gonna be a God, why work hard, right? You get to show up and look stern at meetings with other Gods. Everyone waits for your votes because you’re… thoughtful, and answers like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are as simple to come to as the questions permit. Or maybe you just want a nap, so you say you need to think about it and go have a nap.

I could be good at this.

What’s more, there’s really no reason to intervene when people aren’t thoughtful, either, because the world should deal with it’s own proportionate responses. Every now and then, maybe a smite for someone who was outlandishly thoughtless. Smite?

What powers should there be? I don’t think pyrotechnics displays with bushes are my things, and I don’t like giving out reading material because documentation becomes a headache to maintain. Resetting time might be nice, dragging people forwards and backwards.

That implicitly would give me power over matter and energy, so I suppose that would do.

And…. my favorite part…

This could be a pretty chill job, really.

Social Currency.

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Found in some social media post.

The great Chimpanzee Civilization, which exists on another timeline in another universe somewhere, is an interesting place to explore.

They figured out how to cultivate their own bananas during the agricultural revolution, which was a pretty big deal. Soon there were different types of bananas, and soon the chimps figured out that bananas were power.

Of course, bananas never really existed until they cultivated them.

The civilization became based on the banana. This wasn’t enough, really, so what they did was created banana credits where chimps could have a stockpile of bananas for a rainy day – or pass them down to their next generation in their clan. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but chimpanzees never got into that monogamy thing. It was always about their own little tribe. Passing property from generation to generation only really happened through the tribe, so it was in every tribe’s interest to work together within their tribe.

There was really no reason to create weapons technology, but it happened because of the monkeys that didn’t have the best physical attributes and needed to earn for the tribe. The bananas must flow, that sort of thing.

Things were going well til the great Chimpanzee Philosopher, “Ooh Ooh Ooh” began questioning what was so special about the bananas. Medical experts pointed out that a more balanced diet was needed.

The chimpanzees that made the most future bananas didn’t want things to change, so there were advertising campaigns about the benefits of bananas, that varied diets were ‘fake science’, and that it would be foolish not to want bananas because bananas are everything. Social status was the banana, after all, and no banana… well, you get nothing for no bananas. Look at how important these things are!

A few brave chimpanzees shrugged their shoulders, not understanding why everyone was so into these bananas, but…

Well. Bananas, you know?

You’d think when I’m imagining a different universe things would be different.

Leave a banana at the door if you will.