Even though I still listen to my punk music, even newer bands like Anti-Flag, I’ve not been a part of the punk scene in a very long time. Not in the sense that I go to shows and follow different movements anyway. When I hear about a new term or sub-genre I usually feel old and somewhat out of touch. But then I usually drag out some Ramones, Dead Kennedys, and Bad Religion and feel just like my old self. I have to remind myself that just because I’m a certain number old, that doesn’t mean I’m not still a punk! Look at Henry Rollins!

Anyway, I read an article in UK’s The Guardian about a new movement called taqwacore. It’s Islamic punk rock. The name is taken from the book The Taqwacores (available from indie label Alternative Tentacles, home of Jello Biafra). The book is a work of fiction, but has spawned the movement of Islamic punk worldwide.

The kids that are a part of this movement are not what you think of when you picture a Muslim. They want to shake up the system. They want to make a difference and fight the constraints of the rule heavy religion, and do things their way. They see the poor in Pakistan, who don’t have a voice, and want to yell at the system that abuses them.

Sounds like a good thing to me, at least for a start. I’m very supportive of their “fuck the system” and wanting to make a difference. Right up my alley. However, I tend to agree with Dwight when he said that ‘God, especially of the Allah variety, has no place in punk rock’. It goes against what punk is all about. I mean, how much more controlling, oppressive, censoring, misogynistic, homophobic and so on, can you get than religion. Even the word taqwa is translated as being “God-fearing”. And besides, it makes me think of what Hank Hill told the Christian punk rock band in an episode of King of the Hill.

“Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity any better, you’re just making rock ‘n roll worse.”

Technorati tags: punk, taqwacore, religion

When hubby & I were trying to get pregnant, I found that I had some hormonal issues. We were given a 5% chance of conceiving on our own, with no drugs or medical intervention. We tried a few times with help, but it was during a break from medical treatments when I got pregnant, no help from anyone. Well, outside of hubby of course.

To many people, our baby grrl would be seen as a “miracle baby”. We beat the low odds and now have a healthy, happy baby girl, despite being told we probably wouldn’t do it without help from modern medicine.

It seems that the word “miracle” is so often used in situations like this. From someone surviving a disaster, like a tornado, to someone else beating an illness with a low chance of survival. Numerous news stories can be found detailing their accounts. It’s especially notorious for being used when the word “unexplained” comes into play.

Looking at it from a purely mathematical point of view, Littlewood’s Law makes a lot of sense:

Littlewood’s law, making certain suppositions, is explained as follows: a miracle is defined as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million; during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will experience one thing per second (for instance, seeing the computer screen, the keyboard, the mouse, the article, etc.); additionally, a human is alert for about eight hours per day; and as a result, a human will, in 35 days, have experienced, under these suppositions, 1,008,000 things. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can be expected to observe one miraculous occurrence within the passing of every 35 consecutive days — and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.

Makes those chain letters that want you to pray for a miracle and say that they see them fairly often because they do pray, seem believable when looked at it this way.

But you know what? When a doctor gives a certain chance of success, or even says they don’t expect it, they are just making their best guess. A rough estimate. So someone survives and makes a full recovery. It’s not because that they prayed harder than the poor person in the next room who died, or that god favored them with a miracle. They just hit that probability.

So if I have a brain tumor, like a woman here at work, don’t send out an email like this. I don’t want to hear that people are praying for supernatural healing, rather than a competent doctor and the medical tools he/she uses to work their best:

I pray for a surgeon with steady hands…may God help him find all the tumor and destroy it. I pray for a supernatural healing in (her) body that will surprise all the doctors. Everyone on my side?

(What’s with the “on my side” bit? Is there really an opposing side to hoping this person beats this illness, no matter your religious beliefs?) How much you want to bet if she does recover the miracle label will be thrown around. And while we’re at it, I can’t comprehend begging an all powerful being, who apparently gave me the tumor to begin with, to help my doctor getting rid of it. Why give it to me in the first place? That just seems mean. But I’m digressing here…

Not believing in god, or miracles for that matter, it makes me cringe when people just throw the miracle label on something, instead of trying to find out why a persons cancer went into remission, or how a person was able to survive being buried alive for a week. That kind of research could help other people, and make “miracles” a more common occurrence.

Today my friend David posted about nanoblogging and nanofiction. While I’m not so much interested in the blogging aspect, I am very intrigued with the nanofiction, or flash fiction as I’ve also heard it called.

It’s very short stories, or segments of stories, under 1000 words. These would be perfect to get the creative juices flowing. And would even work as a building block for longer pieces.

I’m hesitant to get into another site I have to visit, but using Twitter to keep it limited to 140 characters total sounds like some good fun. Like when you and a friend have haiku writing wars. I have fun with those.

I looked at using Ficlets, and may stick there instead though. It is specific to writers and people can comment on your pieces.

I have just a week before my Write Club meets again, and I need to get into gear on this months prompt. Why is it so easy sometimes just to ramble on a blog post instead of writing a story?

Technorati tags: writing, flash fiction, ficlets

I’m a computer geek chick, and proud of it. I got into it later in my life, unlike many computer geeks who have been programming &/or tinkering with them since they were young. (My excuse is that I didn’t get to be around computers regularly until I got one of my own. We never had one in my house.) All my mad computer skillz are mostly self taught, although I did take some courses a few years ago and got my A+ certification. I lean towards network and general tech support than programming, as I’m better with figuring out problems and fixing them than dealing with the details needed for writing code. I can do it, but it’s just not my thing.

I have mixed feelings, however, about a recent article in the NY Times. Women have always been a smaller force in the world of working with computers, and even though their numbers are growing in other science and engineering fields, computer science still lacks behind. As a result, some universities are trying to recruit more women into the field.

I should be applauding this, right? As a feminist and a computer geek chick. But what I’m not sure about is the changing of curriculum or admission requirements. I’ve never really gotten a good hold on how I feel about affirmative action, but my instincts have been towards keeping it. Why deny someone who could excel in an area because they didn’t have the opportunities to harvest their skills early? Like me. Or any other young girl who didn’t get to practice coding or have computer classes in school, but would love to be a computer scientist.

The flip side is what about the women who have already made it their life and career? Are we saying they somehow ‘beat the odds’ and good at what they do…for a girl. It seems a bit insulting to change the standards because girls/women can’t program and need a little help. It’s the sexist attitudes about how ‘women can’t do it, then they aren’t needed’ that need to be changed, not the curriculum. We can do it just fine, thankyouverymuch.

Not surprising, most of the comments on Slashdot are from the ‘if women don’t want to do it, fine’ camp.

A big chunk of the article focused on how to help overcome the ‘nerd factor’. The image that comes to mind when a computer geek/programmer is mentioned is usually the same stereotype that has been pushed for decades. Glasses, pocket protector, bad dress sense, loner, no social skills…you get the picture. The professors in the article use this as a big reason both sexes, but women in particular, as to why they don’t enter the field. (I have a gripe about the stereotype still being used so heavily, but that’s a rant for another day…)

Computer science isn’t just about typing out code, and they want to change how it is presented to students, even those still in middle school. I think that is the best way to go. Show kids that they can use CS in ways they never thought. Like developing new computer systems, or designing prosthetics, or figuring out ways to help fight fires.

By doing more to promote the interesting and fun careers available to CS students, I think they will attract women into the field. If I would have been shown some of the options, I may have entered the field much earlier myself.

Technorati tags: feminism, computers

Like many, many people today, I am saddened to hear of Kurt Vonnegut’s death.

He is one of my all time favorite authors, and I have many of his books on my bookshelf. He was a brilliant author and will be sorely missed in the world.

So many other places have done much better at paying tribute to him, I’ll leave you with something from God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian. A background for the title of this post:

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of regards or punishments after I’m dead. My German-American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves “Freethinkers,” which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut wrote, for example, “If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?”

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.

I must re-read Slaughterhouse-Five (at least!), in his honor.

So it goes.

Technorati tags: Kurt Vonnegut, writing

If you looked at the music on my iPod, you’d see some music that doesn’t quite fit in with the punk & alternative. At least at first glance. Two that jump out are by Public Enemy: It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear Of A Black Planet For those familiar with PE, you should realize that even though they are rap, they are very political/fuck the system and fit right in with my other music. Plus, PE are very damn talented.

Anyway, now that I’ve justified my music taste to a bunch of people, we now join the post…

On It Takes A Nation… there is a song called ‘She Watch Channel Zero?!’ where PE talks about a woman who is obsessed with trash TV. (Lyrics are at the link.) The ironic thing to me is that Flavor Flav is one of the kings of trash TV on VH1. He has been on “The Surreal Life”, where he met Brigitte Nielsen. With her, they went on to follow their relationship on “Strange Love”. Once they broke up, he has had two seasons of “Flavor of Love”, where he had women compete against each other for his affection. Not like I really blame him for milking everything he can out of his career. Just makes me shake my head every time that song starts playing.

The other song that makes me shake my head is on Fear Of A Black Planet, called ‘Burn Hollywood Burn’. This is a scathing attack against Hollywood for placing African-Americans in stereotypical roles. The two guests on this song are Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube. What is the ironic part here? Well, Ice Cube is an actor now, getting some big roles. He had his break through roll in Boyz n the Hood, but now he takes roles that seem to be very formulaic at best. I don’t see his role in Are We There Yet? as being a strong, positive role model. He has had some good roles recently, like in Barbershop, but for the most part, all his other movies seem very typical of Hollywood. Definitely not like the movies encouraged in the song.

But then, take all this with a grain of salt. I am only a white girl from Oklahoma, after all.

When I was younger I wrote stories and poetry. Some emo stuff, and general angst writing of being a teenager/young person. Then I didn’t write so much, but it’s always been at the back, and I’d dream of writing. I always seemed to make it harder than it needed to be, so I didn’t even try. Like instead of just write, I’d think I had to always make it something great…like if I didn’t develop it, or I thought it would suck, I’d just abandon writing and go listen to music or something.

Until I found out about NaNoWriMo in 2005. From the gentle coaxing of an online friend at LiveJournal, I set out to work on something - anything - just to see how it would end up. It actually ended up rather well, and I finished my novel! However, as with many people, the dreams of polishing it up and sending it out started to fade as real life came about and the novel went to the back burner.

Of course I also had my baby grrl just a few months later, so I was just a tad busy with her.

Anyway, it’s been bugging me lately. The novel sits, and I think about it from time to time. How this chapter needs to go, or that character needs fleshing out. I read on LiveJournal a couple of my friends who continue to write, and it’s always made me think about picking up the pen (or pounding the keyboard, as it were).

The perfect opportunity to work on it has come though. I now go to a monthly write club, where I work on the story some, submit it, and get some feedback. There are four of us total, and it’s been good to get different perspectives. It needs quite a bit of work, but I hope to get my story eventually to a point I can send it out and try to get it published.

Until then though, I have been also writing a couple of short stories. We do prompts for the write club meetings, to help flex the creativity and writing muscles. I had an epiphany today about how I need to lighten up and not take all my writings seriously or I’ll turn into a tormented writer who can’t bear to write anything unless it’s perfect. I just need to write! Who cares if it is crap! As long as I just keep writing, that’s what matters.

Anyway, there are two points to this post. First is that I may start putting up some of the shorter stories for you guys to read, if anyone is interested. Second is that I have added a Creative Commons license for this site. Anything I put out here is covered by that. Click the button on the right to get the details of mine.

Technorati tags: writing, write club