Today’s Otterday is hosted by an April First Loch Ness Otter, courtesy of Beg Bits, a wildlife tour operator in Mull.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
I found this on Flickr during the week and having been Saving It Specially for today.
I hate this Pepsi Max ad that’s on air a lot right now:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/GiaNFcMSbmA?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
Basically, three men collaborate to trick a woman into having sex with one of them on the premise that the world is about to end. Yay rape! It’s like, so funny because she thought she was going to die!
I don’t have a Tv so i miss these things. Unless you tell me.
Very, very,very stupid ad…Its beyond dumb.
But its not rape.
I am happy, because I got to go to two different zoos this week. And the second one had two oriental short-clawed otters.
.-= Kirstente´s last blog ..Told You Maths Was Useful! =-.
The ad is borderline – while it is possible to rape somebody via a fraudulent misrepresentation that elicits consent where it would otherwise be withheld (e.g. the man who pretended to be his twin to gain consent to sex from his twin’s fiancée), it’s not like this woman was told that having sex with that guy was the only way to stop the asteroid hitting, which is the only way that fraud would legally be occurring.
Shameless act of deceitful manipulation, sure. Just like every other act in this series of ads – the fake shark attack, the fake assault in the job interview – that ends up with one of these guys winning the “prize”. I find the entire campaign concept repulsive.
Also, in more personal news, I ate too much at the family lunch. Dinner is unthinkable.
I think the ad does reflect/contribute to rape culture, which is how I interpreted “yay rape!” There are issues around the deceit and the capacity to fully consent to all aspects of the act – why would anyone use condoms, for example, if they think they have only ten minutes to live?
And why is it hilarious? Because he has tricked her into fucking him, where she wouldn’t have otherwise. Who laughs at that? And why?
I re-did the layout of my main blog ^^ And wrote a length essay on Avatar: The Last Airbender at my steampunk blog. My nerd nodes have been showing all week!
Also, this week I accepted an offer of admission to grad school! Yay!
Congrats to you, Jha!
Lauredhel, absolutely the ad does reflect/contribute to rape culture. I was caught up in legal technicalities, but just because it might not meet the legal test for rape by fraud doesn’t make it not contributing to rape culture.
In other news, a new PSA in the states supporting LGBTQ teens includes Anna Pacquin coming out as bisexual – “I’m Anna Paquin. I’m bisexual, and I give a damn”. Comments at HuffPo immediately jump into assuming that “bisexual”=”polyamorous” and that this is either extremely good (nudge nudge threesomes nudge nudge) news for fiance Stephen Moyer or extremely bad news (because obviously a bisexual partner is more likely to cheat in a monogamous relationship than a heterosexual partner would be). I just. What. Ignorance like this shits me. Which is of course exactly why PSAs like this are needed.
Oh no. No no no no no. “Fuck me to ward off the asteroid” is far from the only fraudulent possible message in that scenario. The AWESOME FUCKING DUDES created a situation of panic, said “You should connect (if you know what I mean and I think you do) with someone close,” another helped empty out the bar.
It’s all fake whether it meets the legal definition of fraud (and I think it does since there was a material benefit intended to be gained from the fraudulent acts). Consent in those circumstances is meaningless. It’s rape.
.-= kaninchenzero´s last blog ..On Deadly Force =-.
Son would like to know: Why is it necessary to call the LHC the LARGE Hadron Collider? It would have to be large, right! TT, you know about these scientific things…
Heh. Hadron Collider is just another term for particle accelerator (aka atom-smasher (colloq.)), and there are plenty of those around that are smaller than the LHC.
A Very Large Hadron Collider is currently in the design/planning stages…
I’m still chuckling about that very long otter. Ms Eleven did a perfect double take when I showed it to her.
Sigh. A few of the blokes at LP started using the US slang term “wifebeater” while singing the praises of work singlets. I told them this term was unacceptable and announced that it was going into the mod filter. They mostly did without a word of complaint, and one tried to continue the discussion without using the word. Good on him.
Then another commentor, who had initially sneered at the term as urban elite “irony” used to denigrate bogans started defending it against “censorship” and stoush has ensued. I get all “butthurt” about “
triviatrivialities”, apparently.Ah, and now we’re onto someone arguing in incredulous terms “does avoiding terms that cause distress to women mean that we should avoid using the term rape then” as if this is a slam-dunk argument.
Actually, yes, Shithead – using the word “rape” to refer to anything that isn’t a discussion of an incident of actual coerced sexual congress is inapfuckingpropriate, all right?
The latest from that thread – lefties (who think that there might just be a problem with using terms like r*p* and w*f*b**t*r as metaphors) are just like the Taliban right.
*headdesk*
Thanks for stepping in to the moderation there today, Deborah – I was out for quite a while this arvo.
Oh well, it’s a while since we’ve had a good stoush over there. If they get upset enough it might make it just a little bit less likely that nearly every thread there gets taken over by the poetry brigade, too. There’s nothing wrong with that on the Salon threads or deliberately lighthearted threads, but it can get a bit much to have it on every single Abbott/Rudd thread as well.
It’s me,
cowoow. I just want to say thank you for doing it. I’d never heard the term before and, for various reasons, felt very upset about it and then even more upset with the term “b*tthurt”. The response is typical when such discourses are threatened with the loss of power. I wrote a whole comment about power structures inhering in words but it disappeared into the ether. Never mind, it’s probably a good thing.What, you don’t like busta rhymes? 🙂
Happy to help. I’m very, very glad that you closed the thread.
I’m very annoyed by people trying to hide nastiness (a straight-out personal criticism of another poster, Casey) behind “cuteness” i.e. cute faux-naif poetry. Makes me want to hurl.
Helen, she seems to have taken a rather disturbing interest in me over the past year. I don’t know why. Listen, do you have an email? I lost the one you sent me. Is there a link on your page?
Casey, I don’t think I saw a long comment of yours floating around in the ether, so I dunno where it went.
Anyway, satisfying as venting can be, I don’t particularly want to turn this thread into any sort of repeat of the other one! What else did folks get up to this weekend?
I went to the Maritime Museum Creatures of Myth exhibition, which was beaut, and I have pictures, but the USB port on the front of my computer is playing up, so I am going to have to connect a cable to the back before I download any of my pics from the last few weeks (!) and who knows when I’m going to have the energy for that?
I have also been practising my Scary Atheist face, given that this is apparently what this country’s bishops and archbishops now expect me to show on all occasions.
You might enjoy this, tigtog: Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus have a sword fight
Oh dear. Poor Darryl the chaplain.
I did snicker at the sword fight line though.
I totally KICKED ASS in the garden. Dead trees and encroaching jungle vines can KICK MY HAIRY BUTT. Yes, I have been reading too many USian blogs lately, why do you ask?
Also, eating far, far too much chocolate and only working overtime on good Friday as opposed to Friday AND Monday – and I STILL feel guilty – Jeez I have a terribly overdeveloped guilt gene!!
And jeez, it’s still hot nights here in Melbourne, must be even sweatier in Sydney and W.A. where you Hoydens live?
We’ve had a bit of a cool change this week, Helen. It’s quite pleasant, although still humid.
Also, I forgot to mention that tekanji has put up a kickarse new FAQ on slut-shaming over at FF101, and Helen reviewed some Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows for me, and these are both adornments to my other blogs.
Ha ha, also drinking too much wine – that should have read KISS (not KICK) MY BIG HAIRY BUTT. If you don’t have the slightest clue what I’m going on about, well join the club… Thanks for the link TT and goodnight all (hic!)
Not quite as awesome as Helen, but we took down a wire fence around the orchard, and I had to wait about two hours but then the words I was hoping for came from the hubby – “you know, I kind of like it without a fence. What do you think?” I think I’ve been hoping you’d say that for a while now. We had been going to replace it with a wooden fence, but we are living with it for a while to see if we still want to. So it will probably never get done. We also put in some fence posts so we can extend the chicken run, as we will probably be adopting 9 new chookies from friends of ours who are posting overseas. Madge, Beryl and Sarah-Jenny are likely to be unimpressed. We also need to come up with some good chook names.
Some bookshelves are being made in the garage, with lots of swearing. Still another thing crossed off the long term to do list, so it’s all good and the neighbours haven’t complained about the swearing yet. Also I got to sit in bed and read the Children’s Book yesterday and scoff a whole Lindt rabbit (a small one) to myself. Luxury.
File under “Oh Dear” – I followed a google alert link to one blog and check out their blogroll. Under “Science” they only had these five blogs:
Ohdearohdearohdearohdear.
Those sock puppets on the Wikileaks thread are really cool! The actual puppets I mean, not the puppeter.
Here’s a large version, Mindy (in which my dodgy photoshopping is a bit more evident):
Not quite as awesome as Helen, but we took down a wire fence around the orchard
Oh pfft please. I only have a piddling little quarter acre suburban thing. It does get a bit rampant, but nowhere near the amount of work you’d be doing!
The hoydenalicious Dawn French and Lenny Henry have split up after 25 years of marriage, yada amicable yada joint parenting yadayada. Their daughter is 18.
I’m sad for them both. They seemed good together.