Don't Beg For Laughs

This is in response to recent events involving a DeviantART user named "CustomSaga" referring to a character-based interview journal on a roleplaying group as, "The sort of thing autistic people come up with." After being banned from the group for his remark, he proceeded to whine on his own journal about the issue, as well as a few other vaguely-substantiated straw men about the goings-on in the group. I called him out on his choice of words, and he proceeded to defend his right to say whatever he wanted and use whatever terminology he wanted as a point of criticism with no reproach whatsoever. He basically felt that his skepticism of the group's project was so compelling in and of itself, he could phrase it in a totally immature, insensitive, and inarticulate manner and it would not paint him as anything less than a civil critic inviting a mature discussion.  

During the torrent of backpedaling and "context mongering," if that's a term, the word "joke" came up toward the tail end of the discussion, used in such a manner as to imply he may well have had no sense of humor or any understanding of how telling jokes is supposed to work. 

The late George Carlin once said, "Even rape can be funny." and, in principle, I agree with that sentiment completely. If my saying that is making your blood boil or getting your head all-a-shakin' over it, I understand completely and don't blame you for it. However, I'd like you to read that sentence again, emphasizing the words "CAN" and "PRINCIPLE." As an artist, I believe that boundaries and rules are made to be pushed, bent, and even broken. This applies to comedy as well. It's not uncommon to see one comedian met with a standing ovation for the same reason another may get booed off stage for telling a similar joke. I've seen one comedian build an entire routine about the sorts of tactics terrorists should be using instead of bombings and hijackings, the audience eating out of his hand the entire time, while another cannot even get past his opening line of, "You know what I love about terrorists?" without the entire house calling for blood. 

Why one routine got cheers while another got jeers can generally be chalked up to luck and timing. Some crowds are a little more forgiving of having their buttons pushed than others, some subjects are best left to simmer a bit before the roasting can begin, and what separates a good comedian from a bad one is how they handle being dealt that bad hand. Stand-Up Comedy was once described by the late Mitch Hedburg as, "the noble profession of convincing a roomful of strangers that you're funny." going on to mention that you can't please everyone all the time. The fact is, barring any open mic night at a local gig, by the time you see a comedian perform on stage, they've gone through their routine dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of times before to a variety of crowds in a plethora of venues. During this time, jokes are either refined or dropped altogether. 

Sometimes, you tell a joke, and it doesn't go over well. Either people don't get it, or worse, they don't think it's funny. At this point, any good comedian knows that quite possibly the worst course of action to take is to defend the joke and insist on its brilliance and edginess. Sure, sometimes a quick quip or well-worded jab can bring an audience back from the edge of the Great Booing Chasm, but the general rule of thumb is that if the audience doesn't laugh the first time, it's because you didn't tell the joke right. As such, explaining it, defending it, and insisting on its merits will never win back that lost first laugh. Not only do those people get booed off stage, but their future in the profession is non-existent. 

There was a post on Facebook some time ago that illustrates this perfectly. It was a panel from a comic wherein iconic supersonic crime-fighter The Flash exposits the extent of his exceptional acceleration by describing occurrences that can only be observed in the space of an attosecond. The rest of the post explained exactly what an attosecond is. Informal definition: there are more attoseconds in the time it takes to say the word "attosecond" than there are grains of sand on all the earth's beaches. One of the comments to this post was, "Dude could rape a b---- and she wouldn't even know it!" 

As you might imagine, quite a few people were offended by this remark. I wasn't offended by it personally, per se, but that's not to knock everyone else who called him out on what he said as sexist and insensitive. They'd every right to be offended, though it seemed more people simply didn't find the joke funny. I thought, "Dude went for the low-hanging fruit. Whatever. Swing and a miss." and that could have been the end of it. Some people got mad, some people didn't laugh, a few clever folks satirically pointed out the logistics of such an event occurring (friction, combustion, and all that), and the joke was generally received as being in poor taste. 

Except that wasn't the end of it, because the idiot who laid that egg felt he was entitled to a laugh, and damned if he wasn't going to leave the discussion without changing at least one mind that his joke was the funniest thing in existence. The point is, him apologizing for the joke may have been unnecessary (courteous, but unnecessary), yet defending it and insisting himself beyond criticism for it puts him well beyond what even the sincerest apology would make amends for. I shouldn't have to explain the limitations of freedom of speech any more than I should have to explain how unrealistic and downright naive it is to insist every joke told receive the same equally positive reaction. 

You bombed. 

Move on. 

Dig UP, Stupid!

Roleplaying group on DeviantART starts a character-based interview journal project wherein featured characters can receive random questions from other users, which are then answered in character. 
This "person" comes along, comments on the first of these interview journals (not the one announcing the project) and calls it, "the sort of thing autistic people come up with." He is immediately banned from the group for what I would hope are obvious reasons and after an attempt to play the "free speech card" despite quite obviously not understanding that the right to speak doesn't guarantee you the right to be respected for your belief. 
He then writes a journal accusing the group of promoting art theft because a work that misappropriated something of his was submitted there (which is like accusing the Post Office of terrorism because those anthrax-envelopes were sent through them). Is it even worth mentioning he never filed an art theft report against the person who took his art because he considers such an act childish? 

UPDATE: The journal in question was later edited, its entire body of text deleted and replaced with "REDACTED." There was also another journal entry (posted after this one) given the same treatment. It's uncertain whether or not that was a "REDACTED" statement from the start or if he attempted digging himself a deeper hole. For the record, redaction is not quite the same as a retraction, and neither of those automatically qualify as apologies. Of course, if he thinks asking an administrator of a website to take action against an offending user is childish and immature, he probably regards apologizing for making ignorant statements and especially defending them as a form of castration. 

Itchy Trigger Finger Warnings

WARNING: The following post contains a discussion of TRIGGER warnings. If you are sensitive to TRIGGERS themselves or the results of said TRIGGERS or if you consider the very word TRIGGER itself to be a TRIGGER, please take precautions against TRIGGERING any further TRIGGERS that may or may not have already been TRIGGERED. Due to the TRIGGERING nature of the following TRIGGER-centric material, this program has been rated T for TRIGGERS by the American Association of Abso-fricking-lutely Nobody. 
And if you clicked on this because you saw the word TRIGGER and were allured by what it may hold, well you're just TRIGGER happy, aren't you? 
I've been really, really frustrated with Tumblr lately. By extension, the internet has been bugging me lately, but Tumblr stands as a kind of distilled vertical slice of the pop culture conversation, so I freely admit to potentially picking on it. 
A few weeks ago, I was ranting about how I hated the term "viral" because, for all intents and purposes, it simply means popular. To be fair, it was very kindly explained to me by a friend that it refers to a phase of popularity where it moves from being spoken of in forums, social sites, and the like to being featured in mainstream media venues. The "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" meme is a rather perfect object lesson in how the process works. It still irks me a little bit to hear it because it makes it sound like the internet is still somehow not as legitimate as terrestrial television, print, and radio. It's that whole "medium is the message" phenomenon that McLuhan spoke of all those years ago. Seriously, the internet as we know it has been around over 20 years and we're still regarding ABC News doing a story on Keyboard Cat as some sort of validation. I get it, sure, and I'm not condemning anyone as "part of the problem" because I don't think it's a problem, it simply makes me wonder if either I'm missing something, or everyone else is, with both being terrifyingly equal in likelihood. 
On Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson made a joke about Lancia's R&D department being more than a little behind the times in terms of their engineering. He said, "Guys, we've this brand new invention. It's a clock that you wear on your wrist!" This is basically how I feel when I see a term used for something that already has a perfectly fitting one. Trigger warnings are the wristwatch du jour. 
I never heard the term "Trigger Warning" until a few weeks ago when a friend on DeviantART posted an image of a woman with her mouth stitched shut. To put this in context, horror themes were nothing new for this artist, it had a maturity warning on it, and a special note was made in the description of its theme. None of these things stopped someone from flipping out (or acting like it) in the comments about "triggers" because the needle was visible. I didn't think anything of it because, like I said, it already had a disclaimer among other measures that would have stopped people from being startled or alarmed. 
Later on, someone else I follow posted an <b>Instagram</b> snap to their Tumblr of a spider they found. Given the reaction this got from a certain reader, you'd swear it was a woman with her mouth stitched shut. "THIS NEEDS A TRIGGER WARNING! I DO NOT NEED TO SEE THIS IN MY TUMBLR AT 7 IN THE AM!" my friend responded very apologetically, and even found a way to put a banner over the image's preview thumbnail. As for the person who vehemently insisted on the trigger warning: 
"I'm not mad or anything... arachnophobia is a weird thing to warn for... that picture wasn't all that bad. Just, y'know, future reference." 
It's that last sentence that downright ticks me off in the worst way. I've dealt with this so much in my life, even from people in my family, where they overreact to something, apologize and admit to how irrational they were being, then effectively put the blame back on you for causing that reaction or not being sensitive enough in the first place. If you tell someone, "Don't mind me when I get carried away." you don't get to be mad at them for not minding you when you get carried away. Say what you mean, mean what you say, and stand the Hell by it. Otherwise, either don't say it, or give a real apology that puts the blame exactly where it belongs. If you're going to accuse people of not reading between the lines, make sure that you can actually read what you've written between said lines. 
Later on, I come across a photo of a girl who looks about thirteen with a bit of back hair. Apparently, it's a phenomenon in some eating disorders. There's also the increasingly present discussion about standards of beauty and body hair. I'm not entirely sure what the context of this photo was meant to be, but what had my attention most was one of the comments: 
"I hate my lanugo. I wish I could shave it off without being triggered as hell by the razor."
Let's ignore the fact that lanugo (a word I only learned today) is present in newborn babies and typically shed after 3 or 4 moths or is replaced by what is called terminal hair (in other words, unless you're a baby genius, you don't have lanugo, you just have body hair in an unusual place) and focus on the part where this person explains why they can't do anything about it. The razor will trigger them. 
A safety razor? Not a straight razor or the razors you get for box cutters or the razors you get for really old shavers that I've only ever seen in movies where people are cutting lines of cocaine for snorting, but a damn Schick Quattro? Now, I'm not saying they're harmless; it's very easy to cut yourself with those so-called safety razors if you're not careful. Hell, I nicked the crap out of my legs a few weeks ago while shaving for... You know what, it's not important. Here's what is: 
I do not suffer from PTSD. I have certain phobias and even a few irrational fears, but none of them entail especially severe reactions or cause any debilitating emotional stress. I am not suicidal. I have on occasion had suicidal thoughts at various points in my life, but none have been more than passing thoughts in times of stress. I have never been diagnosed with depression. I have been depressed and I do get depressed (in fact, I have a rule where I don't have so much as a sip of wine if I'm feeling depressed), but that's not the same as having manic depression. The point I'm making with all this is that my heart goes out to people who have these conditions, it really does. However, there's a fine line between being sensitive or even accommodating to someone's disability and walking on eggshells or just being a doormat. 
The fact is that you have absolutely no idea what may well set someone off and send them into a raving panic. You really have no clue. You can make some educated guesses, but they're still guesses, not guarantees. I would argue there are maybe a total of three, possibly four or five subjects that should carry warnings, things I believe most people would agree on as being particularly loaded or charged. This should especially be kept in mind if it clashes with your normal content or typical output. I don't expect everydaysexism.com to have a warning about rape or abuse, because the damn site is called "Everyday Sexism." Some people are terrified of blood, but does my recent short story, The River of Blood, need a disclaimer? 
I want to be sensitive. I do not want to upset anybody to the point of uncontrollable panic attacks. I do not want anyone's repressed memories to resurface and hit them all at once like a ton of bricks. I do not want to set off anyone's suicidal tendencies. I come across as a cynical and condescending dickhole at times, I admit, and it probably sounds like a convenient excuse for me to say it comes from a place of good intentions, of wanting to be proven wrong, and wanting people to do better because I earnestly believe they can, but I mean it. All that said, the fact remains I am not a therapist. I am not a life coach. Hell, Stuart Smalley has more qualifications than me, and he's not even real. I can help you in addressing your concerns. I'm willing to listen, but I can't live your life for you. 
If you're that sensitive to something that the very mention of it can hurl you into a state of blurry, inconsolable hysteria, you need counseling. If you're already in counseling, get more. If you're already getting more counseling, try another counselor because that one's clearly not doing you that much good. I know it can take years, practically the rest of one's life, to overcome some of these issues. I don't expect you cured in a week and unshakable in the face of danger any more than you should expect me to read your mind and know what gets under your skin. I'm not blaming you, but I don't want you blaming others. Is that fair? 
Further reading from differing points of view: 
http://privilege101.tumblr.com/triggers.html
http://eighthlifecrisis.blogspot.com/2013/02/trigger-warnings-are-stupid.html

Just glasses and utensils now

This has not been a good day, and it's only been morning for about four hours.

I'll leave out the goings-on with my roommate's irritability due to a mishap at her doctor's office resulting in a lapse in receiving her medication. That's been going on a few days and it's mostly tolerable.

This morning I received some equipment I ordered to help with recording my videos, including a Behringer USB mic. I've officially had it installed for about 40 minutes and I'm already thinking about sending it back.

Here's the problem: when I use my webcam to record one of my v-logs or newer reviews, I use Windows Media Encoder as capture software. The main reason for this is that it lets me configure audio and video separately; I can use one device for video, and one for audio (That way, I'm not at the mercy of the webcam's awful built-in mic). Everything seems fine, I set the audio settings to the USB mic, and the video settings to the Ipevo, and set the recording format. Once I hit start, however, I get an error message:

no specified device driver is present 0xC00D0072

This is just impossible as I've installed all necessary drivers and, prior to starting the recording session, the program acknowledged the device's presence and allowed it to be configured. I went to Behringer's site to verify that I did indeed have the most recent driver. I found little to no support articles about the C-1U and ended up having to send an e-mail detailing the issue with WME. I've gotten the obligatory auto-response that it's been received, but a full reply is going to take about one business day. So, that's up in the air.

Then there's the mic itself. It may not work with WME, but it does work with Sound Recorder and Photo Story 3 (though the latter gives me error messages to the contrary despite recordings). I figured that while I'm waiting on a response from Behringer, I'll see how the mic sounds and get a feel for its sensitivity. Ideally, I'd like to have it sitting on my desk next to my webcam so it's not visible in the frame. As a sort of control for the experiment, I just put held it like a Karaoke mic and recorded that way. It sounded brilliant; one of the best microphones I've had. However, when I tried recording again with it on the desk and next to the webcam, it's a whole new story. I should have guessed this might be the case given that putting it on the desk makes a distance of about 2 or 3 feet between me and the mic. That said, it's still really disheartening that I basically have to lean into the mic in order to get the best sound. I'd have to hold it almost directly in front of my mouth while I'm recording, which also means I won't have a free hand if I have to do a review. Me holding a microphone while recording with a webcam would just look horrendous, and it's just not what I got this mic for at all.

So, after days of waiting, and on top of everything else, I finally get my equipment to find that, even if I can get it to interface with my software and recording system, it's completely useless and impractical.

At least I got some of the dishes done before the UPS guy showed up, so the day hasn't started off to a fully-rotten start.