Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: society

  • so it’s sort of social… demented and sad, but social

    I really hate MySpace. Even before I factor in the ways in which it is used, and many of the people using it, I just hate how incredibly ugly and broken it is. It is one thing to give the masses a way to quickly customize a page and another thing to give them options which create audio and visual assault on any person who is unfortunate enough to click a link. I find it foul and hideous and I am saddened by just how popular it is. I even signed up for an account to try to check it out from the inside and see if it was possible to create something more functional with their tools, because, if I could it might be a good level of promotion for the short films I produce. From the inside I found it a total mess as well.

    Even if I ignore the ugly, I am very turned off by the way in which it is used. It doesn’t just give me a bad feeling about the site, the popularity gives me a bad feeling about society – as if I needed extra fodder.

    Because of that, I found this article about Mixi, a Japanese online networking site, and MySpace trying to break into the Japanese market to be very interesting.

    I wonder if I would like Mixi better, if I could score an invite and… you know… read Japanese. Would social networking sites hold more interest for me for actual social networking, if they reflected a different cultural tone? It would be amusing if it turned out that I wasn’t actually anti-social, so much as just living in the wrong society.

  • I’ve been informed that the Hot New Thing

    is twitter. I am skeptical that I will get much use out of it, but I mention it because I know a bunch of you despise losing your preferred userid to the unwashed hordes just because you didn’t know about something early enough. I signed up. The site has been very slow today, no surprise as reports from some conferences are that it is a big topic of conversation. At least it can be set to friends only, so it isn’t just a tool to grow your social network.

  • Rated F’d

    We watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated this weekend.

    The subject matter irritated me to no end, as everyone who knows anything about me knew it would. The movie itself, well I wish it had been a bit better. While the content was something I care about, it definitely was not one of the stronger documentaries I have seen.

    I do not like the MPAA. Actually I heartily dislike the entire system, and that is not all the MPAA’s fault. From the TV networks, to the theater owners, to the studios, to the big chain retailers, they all irritate me.

    I do not like to be told what I can and cannot watch. I do not like to be told what my kid should and should not watch. Most of all I hate for the general public to be relying on a largely arbitrary “stamp” to determine what they let their children watch. It completely infuriates me when they won’t even pay attention to those stamps and then want to complain because they don’t like what their kid watches (or plays). The nanny state does not protect children, it destroys society by relieving so called parents of their responsibility to actually parent.

    One of the useful things about the internet is that there are several sites that do provide detailed content information about films. G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17 and unrated mean nothing to me when it comes to deciding what I am comfortable allowing my daughter to watch. I want to know about themes. I want to know about scenes and the context of the scene. One of the sites that I used to check quite a bit, before they made it so incredibly broken and ugly for non-subscribers was screenit. I actually appreciated it enough that I did subscribe, but again, that was when it worked better for non-subscribers and then subscribers had perks. Now they make it rather unpleasant if you won’t subscribe, and I just preferred to support the old attitude.

    Anyhow, they have the following categories

    • Alcohol/Drugs
    • Blood/Gore
    • Disrespectful/Bad Attitude
    • Frightening/Tense Scenes
    • Guns/Weapons
    • Imitative Behavior
    • Jump Scenes
    • Music (Scary/Tense)
    • Music (Inappropriate)
    • Profanity
    • Sex/Nudity
    • Smoking
    • Tense Family Scenes
    • Topics To Talk About
    • Violence

    Which they first list off as mild, moderate, extreme, etc. If you see something that that makes you immediately certain you wouldn’t want to watch it, or let your child watch it, you can stop. If you are uncertain you can click down for detailed information. Which swear words, which body parts and how many, etc. Of course is you are looking for films with lots of full frontal, such a review can be useful too.

    This I find useful. PG-13 I don’t find useful at all.

    Now they could label a movie however they wanted and I wouldn’t care, except how they rate it affects me. If it is NC-17 a lot of theaters will not play it. They can’t place ads for it in many places. Walmart and Blockbuster won’t carry it. This means that they won’t be able to make nearly as much money, so there is a big push to cut it to an R. Instead of letting the actual consumers decide, the entire system is standing between artists and consumers and making choices on my behalf. Now they often release an unrated DVD later, but that just isn’t the same. For one thing, I have to wait until much later to see it. I do not have a giant screen and spectacular sound system in my house. Not only that, but in many of the cases the unrated DVD releases are no doubt different than the film they would have created if they had just been left alone to tell the story they wanted to tell. There is now added marketing pressure to make more of a difference between the R and unrated version. Then there is the other direction. Getting a G rating is a kiss of box office death if your core audience is about the age of 6, so they add a little extra crap (most often bodily function “humor”) to films to get at least that PG. The assignment of these ratings is affecting the films, leading us to a world with more product and less art.

    I won’t have anything to do with Blockbuster at all because of their policies on NC-17 movies. Their business, and they can run it their way, but I won’t give them my money. Actually I once quit a job over a policy shift along those lines at another video store, but that is a different story.

    Movies should all be rated R anyway, why should kids go see anything without a parent or guardian? Who is going to make them sit down and shut up and stop kicking my seat if they don’t have a parent with them? Oh wait, the parent will probably just be chatting on a cell phone, no doubt calling loudly to complain to a friend about how horrible it is that the movie showed a nipple. I hear so many parents complaining that a PG-13 movie had very objectionable content and should have been rated R. How many times are they going to fall for that PG-13 label and not do further research? Apparently over and over. Is every 13 year old they know the exact same maturity level as every 16 year old they know?

    I don’t even have the energy to start typing about how twisted it is that we seem to be so much more comfortable with violence in this country than we are with nudity. I did enjoy Darren Aronofsky’s assertion that bloodless, exciting, glorified, big action film violence should be for adults only, and lower rated movies should have to show painful, bloody, consequence filled violence instead.

    The MPAA is talking about making some changes, but small DIY improvements are not going to turn an outhouse into a mansion, or even a bathroom. Something is rotten in the state of asinine, power hungry, god fearing, we know what the world should be watching, homophobic, sexual repressed, braindead, holier than thou stupidity, but they are not going to do me the pleasure of bloodlessly cutting out the diseased whole.

    Netflix currently has Jesus Camp on the way to my house for my next viewing displeasure.

  • [ adjective ] [ noun ] to you too

    It is that time of year again. “The Holidays” as if these are the only holidays. It is admittedly not my favorite time of the year, mainly as a matter of convenience. I don’t like how crowded the roads around the stores get. I don’t like how crowded the parking lots get. I don’t like how crowded the stores themselves get. I also don’t care for the vibe I get from inside stores. Because of all of this, I try to stay in my house as much as possible from Thanksgiving through early January, and that can get rather inconvenient. I find the rest of the year plenty inconvenient enough.

    Other things I do enjoy. I enjoy the colder weather at this time of the year. I like it when people carol door to door, but I haven’t had anyone do that in years. I like the decorations that many houses put up, especially the big elaborate homemade ones, and things with lots of sparkly lights. I don’t appreciate the vast aisles of decorations for sale in the stores, but that is just because it displaces normal items and I am stuck wandering around a store I already don’t wish to be in, in search of something that I would normally be able to find rapidly.

    The ever growing PC greeting crap going on surrounding the holidays is definitely getting on my nerves. Mainly because it leads to questions. People wishing me some sort of holiday nicety is one thing, people asking me directly about my holiday leanings is not nearly so welcome.

    Years ago everybody assumed we celebrated Christmas. People would wish us a Merry Christmas and we would smile and wish them one too. It was a honest sentiment, I certainly didn’t wish them an unMerry Christmas. Whatever form of greeting they wanted to offer, I’d offer them one back. If they wanted to say “Happy Holidays” that was fine by me too. It was easy.

    This week somebody started out happily with “Merry Christmas!”
    “You too.” I responded with a warm smile.
    Then she looked concerned and asked “Oh, but do you celebrate Christmas?”
    Not liking to lie directly, I inwardly sighed, and told her still with a smile. “No, we don’t.”
    “Oh, then I shouldn’t say that!”
    “Of course you should, it is a nice thing to wish us.”
    “Happy Hanukkah! Should I say that? Do you celebrate Hanukkah?”
    This was going exactly they way I did not want it to, but still smiling I told her, once again, that we did not. The look of confusion passed over her face. The look I’ve seen many times before.
    “Well, what do you celebrate?” she asked with concern.
    “Just the season,” I lied, or at least half lied. I mean, we celebrate New Years.
    “I don’t want to be inappropriate!” she called after us.

    It isn’t a secret that we don’t celebrate Christmas, but I am not going to have t-shirts printed either. It’s our personal choice. It works for us. It isn’t meant as a judgement on anybody else. It also isn’t something that I want to converse about endlessly with people as they go about their merry business. People are often curious however, so I might as well write it up once and then I can point people to it. Like with many aspects of our lives, there are several reasons behind our choice.

    I don’t believe in Santa Claus. I was brought up on Santa Claus. By the age of five I had serious doubts. It didn’t make sense to me, and yet my parents, both of them, had been telling me about Santa Claus. I left out snacks for this guy. Were they making it up? Were my parents the giver of gifts from Santa Claus? Were my parents eating the snacks? I began to question them as Christmas approached the year I was in kindergarten. They decided they were not ready to give up on the Santa Claus myth yet. One night while both parents were in the kitchen with me, Santa Claus gave me a call on the phone to reassure me that he was real, and he’d be leaving me gifts for Christmas. This bought my parents two more years before they were forced to admit the truth. It also had a lasting affect on just how much I believed what they had to tell me.

    I also just happen to think it is a creepy idea. I don’t want people breaking into my house, whether they be taking things or leaving things. I don’t like the idea of children sitting on random strangers laps at the mall. I also don’t think milk should be consumed after it has been sitting outside of the fridge for half the night, but that is just a whole other issue I have.

    I want my kid to behave because she should damn well behave herself. That is what is good for the family. That is what is good for society. That is what is good for her. It is certainly what is good for me, and that is pretty damn important to me. I do not want her to behave because there is some man watching her all the time who knows if she has been bad or good or naughty or nice or whatever. I don’t want her to behave better because she thinks she might get presents. I just want her to behave because she would be disappointed in herself if she didn’t. Furthermore, why should a guy in some red suit who lives almost half the globe away be determining what behavior is appropriate for her to start with?

    I say “I” not because this was a unilateral decision, but because I don’t want to speak for my husband on precisely what his experiences were (especially those before we met) or current beliefs are. We spoke about the issue and made the no Christmas decision as a team. We came into the relationship still celebrating and we did celebrate some together, but we decided to stop. We stopped before our daughter was born.