Posts by Emma Hart
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Hamish,
Also, hearing that the files were writeable (editable).
Really? Jesus.
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Mind you, you know exactly who could (would) do what Keith did? Bored, inquisitive, mildly anti-social young men...
.... who have children hidden from them in CYFS care, and have just been given enough information to find them.
I read this column last night, and had to go to bed and have a wee cry. And it wasn't just because my daughter's had dealings with Youth Specialty Service that involved funded counselling and drugs.
I was one of those kids. For two years in the 70s, my family was in hiding from my father. He had access rights: on one of those visits he managed to trick me into telling him where we were living (I was six, okay), and we had to move. I had to change schools. The very information Keith has detailed here, which would have been on Social Welfare's files about us, would have been sufficient for my dad to at least find my school and wait for me. He could have used me to find my home, and my mother. She could have died.
If we were in that situation now, all he'd need is some unsupervised time on a kiosk, and the technical knowledge to open a file in Word.
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Forgive, I should have got here sooner. I am not well, and my brain is moving very slowly. Bear with.
I meant, for example, the coffee one. Which is at least D, though not B or S or M.
As a side-note, and not directed at Graeme at all, just trying to keep things clear, BDSM is a thingied acronym. Compressed. Something. It stands for Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism. When Graeme says "D", I am assuming he means "Discipline" not "Dominance".
So, yeah. I'm by no means suggesting that these images have only just started appearing, just that they seem (which I know is awfully subjective) to be getting more common lately. In response, as Tracy points out, to the popularity of Fifty Shades of Not Having a Fucking Clue.
The coffee image is one I find really difficult to parse. I mean, it's stagy and fake and I think it's supposed to be funny, in the context of its time.
But. OTK spanking is, of course, really common in BDSM. It might be part of Discipline, it might equally be part of S&M. So I should have the same issues with it, right? And yet I struggle to, or to connect it in any way to my own experience, because it's just so... silly.
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Up Front: Moa: Sub-Standard, in reply to Morgan Nichol,
But I've been told I'm not good at judging these things.
No, that is pretty much how I read their facial expressions.
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Field Theory: Man Moments, in reply to slarty,
But can I respectfully suggest a little bit of getting over one-selves might be in order?
For a start, the answer to that question was apparently "No you can't." Unless that word "respectfully" doesn't mean what you think it means.
For goodness sake, this is sounding like a bunch of teenagers outraged the first time they notice that the world is a bit unfair.
You what now? What about the discussion before you entered it wasn't calm and specific about what the problems are? You're baiting "intellectual vitriol", but no-one's been as insulting as you have. Not even close. Misogyny doesn't bother you. That's nice. And that of course makes you look much more mature than we.
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Field Theory: Man Moments, in reply to Tristan,
Not familiar with their other advertising
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Field Theory: Man Moments, in reply to Tristan,
Oh Christ now we are upset that a beer company goes after the male market instead of female ?
There's a difference between not pursuing a market, and actively alienating that market.
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Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to Stephen Judd,
The impact of advertising is both weak and cumulative. By the time you have reached middle age, your brand preferences have been set by long repeated exposure and require an even greater exposure to reset and redirect .
I think it varies from product to product. Smokers, for instance, are notorious for not changing brands, no matter how old they are. When we bought a flat-screen, we spent ages shopping round and comparing specs and prices and what you could plug a USB stick into, but I can't see it right now, so I couldn't tell you what brand it is.
OTOH, there are things like cars, where you accumulate knowledge over a period of time that, say, Toyotas and Volkswagons are reliable whereas Subarus are badly-engineered pieces of shit (hypothetically, of course). That's useful knowledge, but if, say, all those companies get sold and practices change, it becomes a less than useful prejudice.
I'm not, to be clear, saying all "old people" are anything, I'm just arguing against the idea that they're all canny and disillusioned through experience. I've seen too many people believe they've won a lottery they didn't enter because that information was presented in an email.
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Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
One explanation I heard suggests as we grow older, the less susceptible we are to the blandishments and deceits of advertising. We don't buy so much by impulse or for status or because of emotional manipulation. Or so they say,,,,.
No-one who's ever done tech support for their parents is going to believe that older people are less susceptible to manipulation.
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Up Front: Submission Pun Goes Here, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I wonder how future generations will view the things we simply take for granted and think of as normal
It's a scary thought, isn't it? At least it's one we're capable of having. Even if we can't see where the changes will one day so "obviously" need to be, we can accept that our idea of "equality" will keep evolving.
I mean, when it comes to legal recognition for relationships, the next step is obviously (and yes I know, just by typing this I'm making Colin Craig very happy) accommodating polyamory. That is, changing the law to recognise something that already happens.
To me, our adoption and abortion laws also clearly need work, and our labour and welfare laws are also clearly headed in an 'away' direction as far as equality is concerned. Maybe that's enough to be getting on with, but there is a sense that one day we might have done all the obvious stuff and be a bit lost.