Posts by Andre Alessi
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In an eerie thematic parallel with Home Brew...
That's quite possibly the first (and only?) time anyone has dared type that phrase. I'm surprised how much I like the song, too.
As for Ben King, the man can do no wrong. He was the friend of a friend in the early days of Goldenhorse, back when he was practically hairless, so I'm impressed with his subsequent beard-growing abilities. Is this a side effect of Speights consumption?
I've been listening to The Mutton Birds almost obsessively recently, as a way to try to get myself into the right headspace for writing a post on my love for Auckland (and for New Zealand as a whole) but I haven't really gone out of my way to watch any of their videos until today. I had forgotten how long ago this all was:
It seems like the only recognisable part of Dominion Rd in that song, the only part that's still there so obviously, is the volcanic rock kerbs.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to bmk,
Yes, people who run a tinny house should have as a golden rule to all buyers ‘respect the neighbourhood’. Go to house quietly, buy your drugs, leave the neighbourhood quietly. Also don’t throw your fastfood rubbish all over the footpath.
It’s funny though. I lived in a flat in Grey Lynn for a year or two where one of the flatmates sold weed (that her father supplied to her-__long__ story there.) She was extremely discreet, and only sold to people she had met face to face in other contexts, so we wouldn’t just have randoms showing up at all hours of the day and night. The landlord lived next door, and would probably have been quite upset had he known, but she made an effort to avoid the kinds of customers that would have made it obvious-mostly guys in their late teens and early twenties.
(Contrast the generally admirable behaviour of these drug consumers with the absolute rudness I experienced when we made the mistake of advertising a garage sale in the Herald one day-people turned up on our verandah two hours before the advertised start at 8:30 am and chatted loudly the entire time until we opened the doors, then acted like they were doing us a favour by invading our home to haggle over a $5 lampshade.)
I wonder if the problem with tinny houses isn’t really the drug-selling, but the people who tend to use tinny houses to buy drugs? As in, the problem behaviours aren’t so much that there’s drug purchasing going on, but that young larrikins are just obnoxious wherever they are, especially in numbers.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
Allowing a commercialised distribution of known problematic substances increases the overall negative outcomes because businesses have a habit of promoting their products with a view to expanding their use i.e. more use of problematic substances = more problems.
Not necessarily. I mean, I understand where you're coming from, and I agree in certain specific scenarios, but as a sweeping statement that's not correct. Assuming "legalization" means that businesses become free to exploit the sale of substances without consequence for their use strikes me as an overly pessimistic view of how legalization would work, to be honest.
As a general rule, the problems arising from drug use come in two forms: limited education on the part of the user (so consumers use drugs in ways that are harmful, when there are other options which minimise that harm) and the quality and nature of the drugs themselves (such as E cut with toxic substances, or the fact that some substances are physiologically addictive.) You can reduce the problems caused by the first relatively easily, and you can definitely make a dent in the magnitude of the second in an environment where these substances are legal and regulated, regardless of what pressures the commercial aspects of legalization put on producers and distributors.
I, for one, think it'd be a great thing to be able to be covered by the Consumer Guarantees Act when buying drugs. I think the only way complete legalization would work would be for the entire chain of production and distribution to be legalized and regulated. That's obviously a much more sweeping change than just legalizing consumption, but I honestly believe it's necessary (and call me an optimist, but I also think it's inevitable.)
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Emma Hart,
On television in particular, the “author’s” ideal intentions can be really constrained, particularly (until quite recently) in portraying sexual same-sex relationships.
Battlestar Galactica did something quite interesting with their webisodes between series that I think (reading between the lines) was for similar reasons. Gaeta's bisexuality wasn't addressed in the broadcast series at all, but in The Face of The Enemy it's a central plot point. They did the same thing with Admiral Cain's relationship with Gina in Razor-it was only alluded to in the broadcast series but it was made canon in the TV movie.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And when it comes to fanfic gone wild, I’ve very pleased Kim Newman’s sublimely batshit Anno Dracula is finally back in print – with the sequels, various interstitial novellas and a new novel to follow.
You could probably throw Dacre Stoker's Dracula: The Un-Dead into that category too (although I'm not sure it merits inclusion on grounds of quality.)
I do think Lucy made a really good point in that Virgil was the original fan fic author. (Although you could probably make a similar case for John of Patmos.)
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Some of those gaps are disturbingly filled now.
I have seen gaps filled in ways I never dreamed possible.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to 3410,
The Wikipedia glossary article is long, but it's a good reference document.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
See, that’s….a little unusual, in my experience. It’s not that characters who are pre-pubescent in canon aren’t the subject of shippy/erotic work, it’s that it’s usually set when they’re, you know, post-pubescent. But, hey, could be I hang out in the wrong fandoms. (For which, in this case, I am extremely not sorry.)
I'd say that the stuff I've seen is probably the exception rather than the rule, thankfully. One of the quirks of engaging with fandoms primarily via Tumblr is that it all gets jumbled up in one feed, and it's easy for something to be presented out of context or misread as having a different context from what was intended. There's also a levelling aspect, where "serious" fan blogs with dozens of posts a day are brought to the same level as one semi-troll who has spent the day surfing the "erotic art" section of deviantart and decided to post something they thought was "funny".
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
It’s way too easy to bring a thick wad of privilege bingo cards to the table – and all too often, frankly creepy levels of man-tronage where women get scolded about not expressing themselves as white cis-males (both gay and straight) think they should.
Absolutely. This is one of those topics where I acknowledge that I'm the outsider here, and that it's really inappropriate for me to be making judgements about what other people should and do enjoy. It would have been nice if Mr (?) Ogas had thought the same-although we'd be poorer one of Emma's threads if he had, so maybe things worked out for the best.
I do think it's a really interesting (though possibly futile) intellectual exercise to try and understand the whys and wherefores of kinks in general, which might sometimes come across as patronising, so if anyone has been offended by my comments (I realise we obviously have a fair few lurkers here on PAS) I can only apologise for that. Ultimately I'm motivated by curiosity, not judgement.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
To clarify, are we talking *actual* paedophilia, or US-style anyone-under-eighteen-constitutes-child-porn “paedophilia”? Because that word gets thrown around a lot more than it needs to be.
Age, as it applies to comic book characters is obviously pretty fluid, but a character like Damian Wayne is generally portrayed as a child of about ten, even in fan art. Tim Drake is generally portrayed about 17, but again I’ve seen younger and older versions.
Without wanting to defend some of the creepier aspects of that kind of fan art, I feel like I need to make the point that as a rule of thumb it’s a lot less focused on infanitilisation than, say, hentai. The characters being portrayed aren’t used because they’re children, but because they’re recognisable characters. The artwork itself doesn’t overemphasize the youth of the participants in the same way that tentacle-demons-having-their-way-with-Japanese-schoolgirls does. The age of the characters is almost incidental for this kind of thing.
I feel really unqualified to comment on this topic, by the way, this is just what I’ve picked up from my completely superficial interactions with the comics fan fic/fan art communities. Feel free to assume that my comments are wrong/stupid/etc
ETA - Reading my earlier comment upthread, it might sound like I'm tarring all fanfic communities with the same brush. That's not my intention at all, I guess this is just another one of those moments where my attempts to understand something from the outside have turned into sweeping statements. With a bit of time, I could probably come up with a more nuanced comment, but basically I think that the few examples of this that I've seen have convinced me there's probably a lot to talk about.