Ferment

The yeast has moved out of the lag phase, and is reproducing like mad. I gave it some shaking, last night, and this morning, to keep the aerobic phase going a little longer, but from here on out they are on their own.

The water-lock is bubbling at about 1cc per second (guesstimated) and there is a pleasant tang to the smell carried in the outgassing. When I gave it a shake there was a fair bit of CO2 released from solution, and I can see bubbles rising all over the surface.

So there will be mead.

I suppose I ought to make a brewing icon, so people will know if they want to skip discussions of fungus.

Painful ruminations

I debated locking this because it is likely to be a bit of a mes since it’s touching on a lot of things, and the subjects are both difficult, and painful. I’m being bullied. I’m being bullied in a place which I’d not really expected it, and in ways which are hard on my self-image.

It's also about things happening elsewhere on the web. But, all things being equal, I'm not much for hiding things, even when they feel vaguely shameful.

I take part in the discussion community of Manboobz which is a blog dedicated to mocking misogyny. It’s not a “safe space”, because the targets of the blog are allowed to come and speak their minds, since they are being attacked for being idiots, and often assholes.

The community is feminist, and has a significant number of queer folk, as well as any number of people who feel strongly about the subject matter; given the larger public discussions of women/feminism going on, and the particular obsessions of the, “Men’s Rights Movement”, as well as the run of the mill misogyny which pervades the culture, there are any number of topics which recur (“false rape” being one of the most common).

I’ve been a commenter there since... I don’t know, somewhat more than 2 ½ years. I am, as is my nature when I am in a community, pretty active. There happen to be a number of atheists in the mix. There are also some theists, some more, some less. It is, oddly enough, in this aspect of things the bullying started, about a year ago. Shortly after I moved to New Jersey someone said something about things, “Christianity has always believed” which weren’t true. I said so, and the discussion got ugly.

It’s not that I said Christianity has never been that way, just that there is nothing inherent in it which requires hatred of homosexuals; and that the present interpretations of that were based on poor translation; and a lack of understanding of the way in which homosexuality was seen in Rome, and to a lesser extent, Greece.

There were a couple of people who took this very amiss. They took it, in fact, as me being an apologist for homophobia, not least because they are not merely atheist, but anti-theist. When the conversation got to a pointless (by virtue of both the vitriol, and one person saying that while they couldn’t read Koine, didn’t follow scholarly research on the early writings of the church and weren’t all that conversant with Roman/Greek culture; they damned well knew what The Truth was about those writings) , I gave it up. I also stopped being all that responsive to the comments of either of those people .

Skip ahead to last May, or so. The person who didn’t care about context made a mistatement about DADT, and what the effects of a discharge under it were. I told them they were wrong. Things got really ugly. My personal experience with the actual policy was declared not only irrelevant, but actually detrimental. I was accused of being an active apologist for anti-homosexual policies, and of being personally homophobic. Not merely of saying something homophobic; something of which I am capable, much as I might not want to do it, just as anyone is capable of saying something racist.

Because DADT is both touchy, and complex, it got really ugly; not least because the effects of DADT are worse, in their way, than the previous policy, but the sanctions are less. From there I stopped dealing with the one person altogether, and the other got even less credit from me. It’s not a help that both of them have a style of interaction which is not merely aggressive, but rude, and hostile. If they disagree, the language is often foul, and scurrilous motives are ascribed to the person with whom they disagree.

Last week someone said, without qualifier, ,“I hate catholics”. They put no qualifiers on it. I asked if they really meant, “all” since there are a lot of Catholics, and some are assholes, and some aren’t.

Things got heated, even a bit ugly. Then came the person I’ve been speaking of, who hadn’t been following the discussion; but rather had someone tell them they needed to see the discussion, to do their usual slagging of theists, with extra-special fulminating on how horridly homophobic I am.

Which is a problem. It’s sort of like being called an alcoholic. This isn’t a face to face relationship I have with the commentariat there. It’s based on what they recall of what I’ve said. To say, “no, I’m not,” isn’t any help. To point out any of the things I’ve done, the people I know, the things I’ve written, immaterial.

And having people say hateful things about one, even (or perhaps more) when one is certain they aren’t true, hurts. It makes one want to withdraw; because vitriol is nasty. And when one knows there is no active defense one can make for oneself; that other people stepping up to the defense is the only thing which can stop it... that also hurts.

What I’ve learned is that making any mention of anything which relates to queer-folk, is to risk having a couple of people come in, waving their situational credibility, to heap scorn; and hatred on me. I have no way to know who might be being swayed by it. But if I want to avoid it, I have to refrain from some subjects; right now those are religion, queer issues. I am pretty sure that at least two of the people who are doing this would be happiest if I were to leave the blog altogether.

What it’s done, for me, and what make it worse, is cause me to doubt myself.

“Sadly, the effect of these comments does not end with the reaction of the target. The Centre’s research also details the phenomenon of ‘stereotype threat’.

While the perpetrators might not believe that they are being sexist, and will often respond that they are “just joking” when challenged, the effects for women are insidious because they create a reaction referred to as ‘stereotype threat’ in which the targeted individuals will often ruminate on the implications and be distracted from the task at hand.

The effects are not limited to the women who are targeted – other women who hear the remarks can also experience stereotype threat as a member of the group whose status is challenged. .

But the perpetrators aren’t violating the rules of the blog. The rules aren’t, “don’t be cruel to people.” They aren’t, “don’t be incivil.” They are, “don’t make threats,”. It’s a bit more complex, but absent more overt evidence of actions in malice, or bad faith, I don’t think the blog owner is going to see it for the bullying I see it to be.

The colors of reality

Aesthetics are strange things.

Take photography. It’s changed a lot in the 30 years or so since I first started being serious with a camera. Even in the 27 years, or so, since I got into the nuts and bolts of the making of pictures it’s changed, a lot. When I started I was looking at film stocks, and grain, and how to manipulate them; when I couldn’t see them (did I push the film, and use a fine-grain developer; at a lower temp, or was I going to shoot it straight, but rush the time in the soup by increasing the temperature, etc.).

But the “look” was limited by the film, and the paper. Color prints had a wider range than slides. Slide film set the standards for “good” color, because magazines used “chromes” to illustrate. That meant five stops of range. That was often narrowed some, because saturation increased if you underexposed some, but at the cost of compressing the spectrum from black to white.

Digital has range closer to that wider range of color print. And in the past 10 years or so that color palette (as well as things like stacking several exposure to create “High Dynamic Range) has expanded. Along come plug-ins for editing software, and apps like instagram, to make it possible to recreate the lost look of days of yore.

Then, because some people think those are overdone, there is an apps to remove the instagram sort of effect. Normalise says it restores pictures which have been, “overdone” back to the way they were. Which is well and good, but the folks at Buzzfeed went and applied the app to scans of actual photos from the ‘60s.

Which is fine, but what got me was this sentence, And it follows that, since Instagram's filters are based in on an aesthetic defined by actual old camera hardware and film, it should work near as well on real old photographs. It kind of does! Here's Andy Warhol sneezing, for example:

Which they followed with some other photos and then this, But this old (Kodachrome?) portrait of John Lennon looks a bit more real.

Real? Not to my eye. The originals look as I recall such photos looking. I actually found the Lennon shot to be much more fake looking. Not that it doesn’t look like Lennon, but rather that it looks like Lennon if you took his picture with a cheap digital camera.

But cheap digital cameras have become the new norm.

Our aesthetic has changed.