Laura Versus Grammar Pedants

Sometimes I get this kind of 'Truman Show'-esque conspiracy theory into my head. What if I'm actually really severely dyslexic and don't know it because everyone is too polite to call me out on it?

Then I remember that that isn't possible because it is 2013 and this is the internet.

These days you can't so much as look at a keyboard without angry people and squiggly red lines correcting you. As if it's funny. As if life isn't difficult enough without your computer not understanding that you are not American and therefore do not analyze things.

By my understanding the basic premise of language is as a form of communication. It's constantly evolving and changing to keep up with the times, and to make the challenge of communicating through words more efficient and effective (see: Ye Olde Shoppe). If I say 'U' instead of 'you', all I've done is save time. U still know what I mean, I've put across what I was trying to put across.

The same goes for me saying 'I done my homework' instead of 'I did my homework'. You're picking up what I'm putting down.

So I don't understand what people's problem is with language being used in a different way than traditional rules and structure dictate. If we did that all the time we'd all still be drowning in extraneous fucking vowels.

Obviously there's a line here. If I don't understand what you're trying to say, then the language you're choosing has failed to fulfil it's purpose, and in that case I'll probably say something. I'm not exactly an advocate of theses no longer than 140 characters. To be honest, if I am consistently spelling something wrong maybe it is good to mention it before I embarrass myself on a cover letter. Just don't be a dick.

It's more a stylistic choice than it is a noble cause, really. Advancement of the English language aside, I don't really care how much you abbreviate as long as it sounds pretty and I know what you're talking about.

Hemingway never used two words where one would do and Joyce just kind of brain-puked words onto the page, so whatever works for you works for you. The highest compliment I've ever received on my writing is that I write exactly how I talk. I like when people write exactly how they talk.

So, in summary, stop being grammar nazis, just because it's fashionable doesn't mean it's cool. And if you call me out on using Oxford commas then I will murder you, because it's not clever and no one cares about Oxford commas deep down, not even you.

On Hating On Hating On Nickelback

The internet hates Nickelback.

How's that for context?

But I'm not really sure why.

I don't claim to be any sort of Nickelback aficionado. I've heard maybe four of their songs, and they were all perfectly adequate mediocre rock ballads. For all I know the rest of Nickelback's discography is a horrifying encylopaedia of musical sin. But probably not. Or at least no more than a lot of other bands.

But then why all of this internet hatred directed at them? They don't claim to be rock gods. Their music isn't great, sure, but an awful lot of music isn't.

Are Nickelback just an arbitrary victim of the internet's cruelties, a synechdoche of shitty music? Did the internet just kind of get swept up in the whole thing and a bit carried away? That's so like the internet. Or am I missing something? What, did they plagiarise something? Use two different time signatures at once? Someone please explain this to me. The internet is a scary place and I just don't understand it most of the time.

Typical

"By the way, I like your hair"
"Oh, thank you. Well, get your fill now, I'm shaving it off in a few weeks"
"All of it?"
"Yup."
"Jesus Christ. Don't"
"I've kind of already got my mind made up."
"Just don't, it'll be awful. Why are you doing it?"
"Because I think it'll look nice, and I'm trying to understand why our culture is so hung up on hair, why nearly everyone I tell acts like it's the worst thing I could do"
"I'm not hung up on your hair. I just don't think you'll look very pretty without it."
"Right."

This is not every conversation, but it's and example of the usual. I'll get into this more later.

Abercrombie Bitch

This is a billboard that is now on display above the Abercrombie & Fitch store on College Green in Dublin (the billboard pictured is in Brussels, but the billboard in Dublin is identical). It's huge and it's attention grabbing and it's in one of the busiest areas in the city. 

So from an advertising standpoint, it's pretty good, right? Well, no. All A&F seem to have succeeded in doing is piss me off. For quite a few reasons:

1. This is objectification in it's worst form

They have not only turned this man into an object, they've turned him into part of an object. The head of the image and anything below the crotch has been cropped out, and the focus of the image is clearly the man's muscular torso. 

This clothing company are trying to use an almost naked man to sell their clothes. Just... think about that for a second. 

2. This is a highly sexualised image

He seems to be actually in the act of taking the jeans off. This is probably the lowest they could pull the jeans down without his genitals being shown, and to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if some Photoshop had to be done to remove the base of his penis from the image. 

This is on display in a very public area, close to many tourist attractions and main streets. Hundreds, probably thousands of children walk past this billboard on a daily basis now and I personally wouldn't want my child to be exposed to this image in a context of normality. This is not a normal or acceptable ad.

I don't know about anyone else but attempting to make the photo look "artsy" by putting it in black and white isn't fooling me.

3. This is an unrealistic depiction and idealisation of the male form

Lots of men will see this ad. Boys and young men are particularily vulnerable to low self esteem and negative body image, and I don't think this is helping. This man is being sold as something that you want. He is supposed to be sexy. 

The message being sent out is that in order to be sexy you should have no shirt, no body fat, no chest or pubic hair, no face and indeed, no discernable identity. There is increasing body pressure on men these days and what is portrayed here is near impossible to achieve, not healthy, and in my opinion, not really very sexy. Men are being told that this is what to aim for.

Lucky for me, this ad hasn't changed my view of what a desirable man should look like, because if I were looking for a man who looked like this, I'd be searching for a while. Plus, everyone knows that all the headless bodybuilders with alopecia are either gay or taken.

4. This is not feminist

One of the most common comments I've heard about this billboard so far is "If this were a photo of a woman, there'd be outrage".

Well speaking as a feminist, I am outraged. Obviously I can only speak for myself but I like to think that other feminists wouldn't be too happy either. Objectifying men does not nullify the objectification of women, it only makes the problem twice as bad.

This is not the kind of equality we are looking for.

5. This is not a clothing ad

What are these guys trying to sell anyway? As far as I know, A&F is a clothing brand. Presumably their adverts would attempt to showcase and persuade you to buy A&F clothes. But instead they've made this man's nakedness the focus of this billboard, and the only clothing visible at all is a couple of inches of waistband, which don't even display the company logo or any other sign that they are A&F jeans. The model is actually blocking out the brand name. If I weren't familiar with the brand already I'd have no clue what this ad was even for.

Seeing this ad, I do not want to buy a pair of A&F jeans. I pity anyone that does.

Today was a waste of underpants.

I don't really understand how it's after 8pm already. I woke up, had some toast, went on the internet, and that was 10 hours ago. I literally took a sip of my elevenses tea between those two sentences. I really may as well have not gotten dressed.

How do I keep wasting days like this? I have a dozen things that I could be doing, and that I'd like to be doing, and yet here I am, in bed still. I have editing and writing and sewing to do. I was in the mood to go to the beach but no one was free and I didnt want to go swimming alone in case the beach was deserted and I drowned.

I should have an alarm that goes off at 12:30pm everyday and if I'm not out of the house then I'll have to force myself to leave and go for a walk and do some photography or something.

No-one wants to go to the beach anytime soon because it's forecast to rain. We'd be swimming. I kind of don't understand why everyone is so deathly afraid of rain. I used to get caught out in the rain a lot when I was in my early teens but thinking about it I haven't been properly drenched in years. It's kind of sad, getting rained on is a pretty human experience. I love the feeling where you're so drenched that you figure there's no point trying to stay out of the rain anymore. I'm going to start neglecting the weather more.

Really I'm just writing this so that I'll have something to show for my day.

Few updates: My hearing is back, apparently the only way to avoid it happening again is to not get water in my ears. So that sucks, but the hearing loss is easily resolved.

My internet names are now all under Ren instead of Laura because the more I thought about it the less I liked how easy it was to find me online if you wanted to.

I've been writing and filming a bit, but not much. It'll pick up in July. I finally got enough money together to order my camera, which I did yesterday. May the rack focus commence!

Other than that, I've just been napping and eating junk food with Aine.

In One Ear

So my hearing has gone a bit weird this last week. At first it was just the right ear, and now it's both. There's kind of a constant white noise going in the right one, too. This has led to a lot of smiling and nodding politely, a lot of laptop volume turned up far too high,  and very little leaving the house.

My bus ticket has finally run out, and I lack the necessary €86 to get another one (Dublin Bus fares have just become bloody extortionate at this point). I want to go to the library and pick up my library card, and maybe go to town and buy some black and white film, but I'd have to cycle which I'm quite afraid to do right now. The cat is sitting at my knees and I can't hear him purring unless I press my ear into his side, so I doubt I would hear a car coming if I was on the bike.

I guess my main point here is that I am extremely bored and being deaf would fucking suck.

Art for Art's Sake.

I just got back from the cinema. Áine and I went to Snow White and the Huntsman as an excuse to eat ice cream and hot dogs and drink a litre and a half of Diet Coke (watching my figure, y'know?). Last week we went to Dark Shadows for the same reason, but the cinema didn't have hotdogs then and we were majorly pissed.

And a trend I've been noticing in these films lately is that now that CGI technology has come as far as it has, they're just kind of sticking special effects in for the craic. This is the part where I would include a spoiler warning but the special effects I'm describing have absolutely no bearing on any plot or character points.

I would love to have been in the production meeting for SWATH when some producer was flicking through the script and spoke up with "Look, I'm just spitballin' here, but could we have someone melt at some point? We could work that in somewhere, right? In the Dark Forest or something, all kinds of crazy shit happens in there."
And all the lackeys would have nodded and said "Yah, I love it, I love it". And the producer, buoyed by the approval of his idea, would have said "And I was thinking, just stick with me on this one, guys. While she's delivering this speech, what if she was just like, standing in a fire? Just, y'know, crisping up and blistering, real slow like". And the lackeys would have applauded and nodded. And one of them would say "That is pure Snow White gold!" to a snort of appreciation or two. At which point the producer would have said "Speaking of white gold....". Meeting adjourned.

In Dark Shadows, the first time I saw the porcelain cracking effect on one of the characters, I thought "Wow, that's really cool. It's an interesting way of conveying this characters emotional state right now. It kind of gives her this superhuman humanity". And if it had been left at that, it would have been a cute little moment. But then in the last twenty minutes of the film, this whole "The characters skin cracks open" thing was brought back in and by the end of it she looks like a fuckin' egg that got dropped on the floor a few times. And I was thinking "Oh so when they kill her she's just going to like shatter into hundreds of pieces. That'll look pretty cool."

THIS IS THE BIT WHERE SPOILERS KIND OF BECOME AN ISSUE.

 But no, when she dies, she just kind of dies. She may as well have not had half her face missing at all for all the damage it did her.

And then, for no plot-advancing reason whatsoever, and with no apparent foreshadowing, Chloe Moretz is just a werewolf. She just fuckin' is. And the thing is, that her being a werewolf offers her no advantage in fighting that Blonde Witch-Egg-Porcelain-Doll Hybrid. She gets her ass handed to her either way, so my question is this; why make her a werewolf at all? Why not just have the human character come out and fight the BWEPDH? Is it to add an extra layer of mythical creature goodness to the film, like when you dust icing sugar on top of a tiramasu? Or is it, as I suspect, just to give the special effects editor something else to do? I swear if I was sitting in front of a computer for months at a time rendering Chloe Moretz into a green werewolf for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever, I would want to be getting paid a serious amount of money. A girl can dream.

ROUND ABOUT HERE IS WHERE I STOP SPOILING SHITTY MOVIES FOR YOU AND LEAVE IT TO THE SPECIAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR.

So, while I'm all for CGI and special effects and all of the wonderful things they have brought us, can we just like, ease the fuck off a little, guys? Because all we're doing is distracting the audience from what's happening in the film with no advantage to the advancement of the plot or character development. Because all of a sudden instead of watching the film I'm like "Oh wow, look at that. Those are some pretty cool effects. I wonder if they had to animate each hair individually on that, like with Sully in Monsters, Inc." and my suspension of disbelief is thrown all outta whack. Sigh.

Also, as a sidenote, and on a somewhat related topic.... You know those moments you occasionally have in films where your suspension of disbelief goes completely out the window and you kind of realise that all you're watching is a bunch of actors on a set with a camera being pointed at them? I had one of those in SWATH. I realised that what I was looking at was a camera's view of about twenty horses clumsily balleting through mud, with some really quite nervous actors sitting on them, and a director sitting at a monitor a few feet away going "Mmmm, yeah. This is pure Snow White gold."