Restraint

sexual harassment for fun and profit

July 25, 2009 – 2:46 am

There are a lot of things happening in my life that I’d like to write about, but my heart is heavy and my skin is raw. Instead, I’m going to write about this new contest from Electronic Arts:

Stay classy, EA.

Stay classy, EA.

I’ll give you a minute to re-read the ‘How To Win’ section a few times.

That’s right, EA literally wants you to sexually harass the booth babes at Comic-Con. You don’t have to settle for staring awkwardly at scantily-clad flesh and working up the nerve to brush your hand against an ass or two as you walk past them; their employer has actually posted a sexual bounty on them — so please feel free to grab a handful and get your money’s worth! And if your photos are the most ass-grabbingly great (keeping in mind step 3!) you’ll get to take them out to dinner in a fancy limo!

…

Goddamn it if EA isn’t the worst thing to happen to video games since Ultima Online. (Actually, scratch that. They published Ultima Online. I guess they’re just the worst thing.)

Every now and then I think about dropping everything and getting back into the video game industry, but then I am gripped by this fear, this panic, that somehow someday somewhere I would end up working for EA, and that’s enough to shake those dreams from my hair.

…

Oh, booth babes. Have we not yet visited enough ignominy and nerd germs upon you? Truly, you are the most underappreciated of all sex workers.

Corey & Vampirella

Corey & Vampirella. photo: roadkillbuddha

Posted in Gaming, Politics | Tagged | Comments (1)

Things wrong with America’s criminal justice system: Second in a series.

July 21, 2009 – 4:19 am

Today’s subject: Joe Arpaio!

If you’re lucky enough not to live in AZ, you might not know about Joe Arpaio. He’s the Maricopa County Sheriff signed a promise to serve only one term when he was elected in 1992. He’s still the Sheriff. When it comes to drug warriors, this guy doesn’t mess around. He’s got a self-propelled howitzer with “Sheriff Arpaio’s War on Drugs” painted on it, with some tasteful lightning bolts added for effect.

From a New Yorker profile of Sheriff Joe (pdf):

Arpaio ordered small, heavily publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails. Skin magazines. Movies. Coffee. Hot lunches. Salt and pepper–Arpaio estimated that he saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal. “It costs more to feed dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me. Jail, Arpaio likes to say, is not a spa– it’s punishment. He wants inmated whose keenest wish is never to get locked up again. He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-Span, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. “They hated him,” he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”

Arpaio wasn’t kidding about chain gangs. Foreign television reporters couldn’t get enough footage of his inmates shuffling through the desert. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody–whom the Sheriff calls, with pervasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime–kept occurring to him. He put his inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms. The shock value of these retro prisoner outifts was powerful and complex. There was comedy, nostalgia, dehumanization, even a whiff of something annihilationist. He created female chain gangs, “the first in the history of the world,” and, eventualy, juvenile chain gangs.

Joe Arpaio is directly and personally responsible for stillbirths and miscarriages; and the deaths, brain damage, and severe injuries of newborn babies. Women who go into labor while in his jail aren’t allowed to hold or even see their babies after they’re born, even the ones who survive.

Arpaio has a reality show on Fox called “Smile You’re Under Arrest.” The premise of the show is to use big-breasted women and promises of a $300 prize to get people with nonviolent warrants to show up at a nightclub taken over by Joe for this purpose, and filled with paid actors and undercover cops (all at county expense). Then they have to participate- on national television- in either a fashion show or a dancing contest. Joe hides behind a curtain or under a covered table during all this; and after the fashion show or dancing contest is over, he jumps out and arrests them. Meanwhile over 40,000 felony warrants, many of them for rape or murder, go unserved and the homicide rate has jumped 167%. I’m not making this shit up.

( Much, much more, behind the cut… )

Arpaio's War on Drugs

(Most of this post is courtesy of SA’s HidingFromGoro. )

Posted in Politics | Tagged | Comments (6)

Let’s Go To Prison

July 18, 2009 – 12:52 am

Every year, over 90,000 women are raped in the United States.

If you’re an activist (or spend much time around activists), you might know this already. You might even talk about it, argue about why it happens, the effect it has on people, how to stop it.

What is less well-known is that every year, over 140,000 men are raped in the United States.

No one talks about it because it happens inside of prisons. No one cares about it because it happens to prisoners. On the inside, guards use rape (both implied and actual) as a form of prisoner control. On the outside, people joke about it. Worse even, they see it as a form of punishment prisoners should endure, even though rape inside of a prison is an order of magnitude more likely to transmit a disease than rape outside of one.

This is what 140,000 people looks like:

140000-people

Generations from now, our treatment of criminals will be looked at with the same disgust and horror that slavery is viewed with today, and our society will rightly be condemned as cruel and barbaric for it.

Posted in Politics | Comments (95)

Parliament under attack

July 16, 2009 – 12:21 am

The cats on Parliament Hill have been recently joined by an even cuter set of characters.

Posted in Ottawa, Photography | Comments (0)

“You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he told her.

July 15, 2009 – 1:22 pm

Alexander Charchar reimagines the cover art for Nineteen Eighty-Four:

1984 Reimagined
(Via the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.)

Posted in Design, Geekdom | Tagged , | Comments (1)

status++

July 5, 2009 – 10:57 pm

+ I am posting this from in my new place in Chinatown.
+ My new apartment is two floors above someone amazing who I love.
- She has terrible wireless!
+ I got a free a mug with a kitten on it from the people who moved out!
+ Also a couch and TV stand!
- My TV just might be too epic to fit through the stairs.
+ I played an awesome set at Festival Kinetik in Montreal back in May, without a single on-stage reboot.
+ I also released the Ad·ver·sary remix disc!
+ I have some good ideas for the next Ad·ver·sary record.
+ They involve coal miners.
+ I have been practising for my Bluesfest show with Peter Murphy.
+ I also played an awesome show with Cyanotic at Zaphods.
-  …but I couldn’t join them for the whole tour due to work/sick/more.
± I then spent at least twenty hours watching Ken Burns documentaries in a haze of sickness.
- I have been too stressed and busy to write much lately.
+ I am going to order pizza.
+ It is going to be delicious.

Addendum:
+ It was delicious.

Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (3)

man i could really go for some burger king right now

June 26, 2009 – 7:53 am

VW Ad

Posted in WTF | Tagged | Comments (1)

(365.25 * 30) + 3

May 25, 2009 – 3:03 am

When my father was 27 years old, he held the owner of a downtown Ottawa hotel (and his lawyers) hostage at gunpoint, and forced them to sign papers transferring ownership of the building to him.  When he was 28, he burned the 145-year-old building to the ground to collect a half-million dollars in insurance money. He was thirty when he was indicted.

I never wanted to be anything in particular by the time I was thirty (assuming, like all teenagers, that I would never make it there), but I knew exactly what I didn’t want to be.

…

Just over three years ago I wrote about getting fucked over by the people I lived with, and resolved not to waste my time and energy on people who don’t hold up their end of the social contract (my “no jerks” policy). It was tougher than I can find words for, and I had to cut out a lot of people in my life who I previously considered friends — and while there are still holes in my heart where people I’ve lost used to be, my quality of life changed overnight, and I haven’t looked back.

I’ve also tried a lot of things since then to address the problems I have that are internal rather than external: Neurotherapy, meds, drugs, Man’s Search For Meaning and a fleet of therapists — I even wrote a fucking album — but it’s like chewing tylenol while walking on glass, and I’ve come to understand why that is:

I’ve spent my entire life living a series of shared fortunes; I’ve always been responsible for other people’s welfare, and other people have always been responsible for mine.

I need to own my own happiness and security, and no one else’s. I realized this last year, and set a deadline of my thirtieth birthday to get there. And so I have made some big decisions and taken some drastic steps in the last six or seven months.

I’m moving out of the house I share with Leslie, Mike and Suzanne — a house I love, where I live with people I love — into an apartment of my own. A place where I’m not ever worried about wrecking other people’s lives, where I won’t ever have to stress about collective finances, where I’m never going to get a surprise $1000+ hydro bill (or several of them consecutively), and where I can know exactly, every month, just how much I need to spend on where I live. Where no one’s nose gets broken but mine if I fuck things up.

I need space to take inventory of my own wants and needs, so that I can triage and try to make sure they don’t reach crisis proportions again.

I’m going to take whatever time I need to get my head and heart straight so that I can be a better friend, partner, activist, lover.

So I can build something that I am proud to share with the people I love and trust.

Posted in Writing | Comments (3)

Let me tell you about my mother.

May 12, 2009 – 10:07 am

Deckard’s blaster went on the auction block last week:

Featuring custom amber grips, dual triggers, and rich Corinthian leather.

Featuring custom amber grips, dual triggers, and rich Corinthian leather.

…don’t have an extra $258,750 to spend? You can always DIY.

(Via MeFi.)

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Under the bridge

May 11, 2009 – 12:31 am

Posted in Ottawa, Photography | Comments (0)
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