S e n t e n t i o l a

torayot:

wholesomeobsessive:

torayot:

wholesomeobsessive:

torayot:

What does it mean?

They mean facial expressions but can’t be bothered to write that?

Aha!

I thought it meant literally in their eyes - as in the irises and pupils - rather than the configuration of parts around the eyes and elsewhere on the face.

It’s just easier to write or something.  And sometimes facial expressions are so subtle it feels like it’s all in the way they’re looking at us.  It’s hard to describe the slight movement of facial muscles that convey emotion.

That’s true. Thank you (and Katerz) for clarifying. Just thinking about this makes me think even more sharply about how I don’t much know how to deal with people.

I agree with the above, but also I think there genuinely is some kind of literary convention that you’re supposed to be able to tell someone’s expression from looking at their actual eyeballs.  See also ‘twinkle in their eye’ and suchlike.  I think there may be some very slight scientific basis for twinkliness of eyes being related to eyes getting a bit more watery and therefore reflective when the person has certain emotions or something, but essentially the use of phrases like that in descriptive prose has almost nothing to do with observed reality, it’s just the repetition of phrases that writers learn from reading other writers’ descriptive prose.

The media coverage of this news story about bail has been completely ridiculous.  The impression being given is that suddenly the police can’t bail suspects any more and will just have to let them go.  Oh noes!  Terrible!  Horrifying!  Not remotely true, however.

Here’s what’s happened.  The powers of the police to detain people without charge come from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.  They can hold someone for up to thirty-six hours, then they have to apply to a court for an extension of up to thirty-six more hours.  After that, you have to let them go unless you have new evidence, in which case you can re-arrest them.  (Here’s the text of the relevant bit of the Act if you want.)

For twenty-five years, the police have been getting the extension, releasing the suspect on bail before the extension warrant ran out, and then some time later — weeks or months later maybe — taking the suspect back into custody for however long was left on the warrant.  Which is fine unless you actually read the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which makes it pretty flaming clear that the warrant is valid for thirty-six hours from the time when the suspect arrives at the police station.  Not thirty-six hours that you can use in whatever chunks you like over any period.

The surprising thing here is not that a High Court judge has interpreted the Act in this way.  The surprising thing is that nobody has interpreted it properly before.  Seriously.  I mean, it is a fairly complex bit of legislation and I wouldn’t expect someone without any legal training to find it obvious.  But I would expect anyone upwards of an undergraduate in law to find it very difficult to come up with any other interpretation.  I had to spend fifteen minutes after reading the ruling trying to find out what I’d missed that made it less obvious.  (Answer: nothing.)

But that isn’t the point.  The point is the consequences of the ruling.  Which are unimpressive.  The police can still detain people without charge for up to ninety-six hours.  The police can still release people on bail after that, for as long as they want.  And they can still re-arrest them after that, as long as they have some new evidence.  What they can’t do is release them on bail and then re-arrest them just because they feel like it.

The thing is, you know, sometimes you can sympathize with journalists who hype up a story to sound more exciting than it is.  They have to make a living, after all.  But there is already a pretty dramatic story here that also has the benefit of actually being true.  The story is not that the police have lost a crucial power and are now completely incapable of fighting crime effectively.  The story is that the police have been detaining people for the last twenty-five years using a power they didn’t have.

Journalists.  This is not difficult.  Please try harder.

So, I think I heard that Parliament forcibly broke the strike in some way, is that right?  Which is a shame.  But on an entirely selfish note, does that mean if I post something to Canada it will probably arrive?

[Spoilers for new Doctor Who up to the latest episode, especially series 6.]

So I’ve heard a few people saying they find River Song’s relationship with the Doctor icky following the revelation that she’s the future version of Amy’s and Rory’s baby daughter and I’m now wondering whether I’m some kind of horrible person for not seeing the problem. Like… is it that he met her while she was a baby? That she slept in the cot he slept in when he was a baby? That she’s his friends’ daughter? I genuinely don’t understand.

Is it the age-gap? But, first of all, what’s wrong with age-gap relationships if they’re non-exploitative, consensual, mutually respectful, and the partners are on an equal footing (all of which is clearly true of the relationship between adult River and the Doctor)? And secondly, we always knew there was an age-gap: the Doctor is nearly a thousand years old and River, as far as anyone ever knew, is human and therefore probably quite a lot younger. Plus Alex Kingston is a fair bit older than Matt Smith, so just going by appearances there’s a gap the other way. Thirdly, they’re both time-travellers and their relationship is non-chronological so even applying the concept of an age-gap to them makes no sense. They’re each different ages every time they meet. Now that we know River is some kind of Time Lord, it’s quite possible that at some of their previous meetings she’s been several millennia older than the Doctor. And the fact that she was born at a certain point in absolute chronological time and he at another is completely irrelevant to everything because they move through time in a non-chronological way. I mean, unless some bit of Who canon that I don’t know about says otherwise, we don’t even know when, in absolute time, the Doctor was born. He may not be born until millennia after River is.

If the icky thing is that he’s met her when she was a baby and held her and stuff, well, okay, if the idea of that makes you feel uncomfortable then they’re your feelings and good luck with them, but objectively, what, again, is wrong with that? If you went back in time and met your lover’s baby self, and picked up and cradled the baby, would you expect people to say ‘ew’? Would you find it icky to hold the baby? That just seems weird to me. I mean, we’ve all been babies. Even the people we have sex with. If you go out with someone for a while there’s a good chance you’ll see photos of them being a baby. If you sleep with someone, go back in time and meet them when they’re a baby, and then go forward in time again and sleep with their adult self again, I don’t see how that’s any less okay than if you sleep with someone, look at baby-pictures of them, and then sleep with them again.

Some people have compared it to Breaking dawn. [Spoilers ahead for Breaking dawn.] They seem to me completely different in every important way. The icky thing is that Jacob falls in love with what’s-her-name when she is a baby. He is in love with a baby. There is, as far as I can recall, no indication whatsoever in A good man goes to war that the Doctor is in love with, fancies, or wants to have sexytimes with baby River. He relates to her like she’s his friends’ baby and that’s all. He doesn’t even know she’s going to be River until after she gets abducted so his interaction with her is in no way affected by the fact that he wants to snog her future self.

So. Help me out here. What is the problem with this relationship?

evewithanapple:

But I want to give it a shot. If you live in Canada, you’re probably aware of the disruption in postal delivery right now- what you might not know is the cause. The original rotating strikes (which still allowed for mail delivery) were in response to potential changes in health and safety protection and wages. The workers went on strike to try and protect their rights, but they were still trying to do their jobs to the best of their ability. The current situation is not their fault.

It’s not even Canada Post’s fault, though they did aggravate things. In response to the rotating strikes, they locked their workers out of the workplace, effectively halting mail delivery altogether. It’s sort of a “no, I dumped YOU” strategy- the workers can’t be on strike if they can’t get into the workplace. So things were essentially at a standstill- nobody was delivering mail, nobody was on strike, and both parties had no choice but to try and negotiate.

And then … the federal government stepped in. Stephen Harper’s Tories are trying to push “back-to-work” legislation through- a law that will force the Post workers to return to their jobs without having any of their demands met. Essentially, they’re trying to break the union. If this bill goes through, the government will be able to force workers back to unsafe working conditions, back to unfair wages, and back to no medical benefits or usable pensions. They are trying to rob unions of the power to protect their workers. Remember those Triangle posts I was making a few days ago? Under this legislation, employees could be forced back to an employer who kept them under those conditions. And there’s nothing they could do about it.

We have to stop this. We have to stop this now. The NDP are doing their best to dely the proceedings, but they can only drag their feet for so long. We need to make our voices heard, and let the government know that this is not okay, and we won’t stand for it. A Canada that breaks unions isn’t a Canada I want to live in.

If you’re interested in helping to organize a protest- and if you live in or around the Hamilton-Wentworth area- message me, and I’ll send you my e-mail address so we can discuss it further. If you’re not in the area, please pass this on. I’ve seen Tumblr pull behind causes like this before, and we need this desperately. We need to make our voices heard, and we need it now.

I don’t know the ins and outs of this situation but some of you live in Canada — hi! — and might be interested in some pro-union activity.

From my window at work I have a view across some gardens, and through a gap between two trees on the far side of the garden I can see a red-brick building with a lot of windows.  The other day, a bright sunny day, I saw one of those windows open and a pair of net curtains billow lightly out from beneath the raised sash.  Suddenly in the still room I could almost feel the dry hot air moving outside in strong, steady currents.

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Oh!  Hello there, back in my archive.  :)

What?  Can it be true?  Have I actually caught up on Tumblr?

Wow.  What do I do with my free time now?

Oh, I guess I reblog all the stuff I saved to reblog and post all the stuff I’ve been meaning to post.

;)

ihavechortles:

awyeahmona:

makemefeelsounpretty:

So as you all know during Tumblr’s redesigning they gave us new ask box features such as the private messaging feature. This is great and Tumblr I thank you.

But the down side is that you cannot post links in ask boxes anymore so this is a down side if you want to link people to your follow friday’s and stuff.

The thing I want my followers to note is that if you send a message with more than three full stops, it won’t send. I know, very silly. 

Someone told me that, that was the case but I didn’t really understand at first. Then one of my Tumblr friends said they had been sending me a lot of questions but I got none of them because of that rule. Also they didn’t get any of my long messages.

I just want to post this to let people know. Don’t go sending messages with a load of full stops. If someone does not respond to your question, now you know one of the possible reasons why.

Not sure if you understand this. Reply to this post saying so if you don’t. I will try and help.

Thank you. Hope this helps in any way.

Well now I know why a few people never seemed to have receive my messages. I USE SO MANY FULLSTOPS WHEN I’M TYPING CONVERSATIONALLY…..:|

no-one ever sends me messages, but this is probably good for folks to know.

WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS RESTRICTION

Oh, Tumblr — if this is your attempt to make my communications more succinct, it’s an effort for which I’m sure many people will thank you, but I must tell you this: you will fail!  All this will achieve is to turn my correspondence into a corpus of sentences of Joycean length, girded about with a panoply of punctuation (for there are far more ways to break a flow of words than just a full stop, and I assure you I’m acquainted with most of them if not all) and so layered not only with clauses but also with sub-clauses, as you might expect, and sub-sub-clauses, these being, without a doubt, somewhat rarer, not to mention sub-sub-sub-clauses, which (if were — which I am not — a betting man) I might wager are rarer still, and perhaps even sub-sub-sub-clauses, if I can keep my concentration sharp enough to manage them, for they are truly the most unmanageable beasts, at least to all but the most masterful, among which number I do not hope to be counted, that by the time I reach the end the poor reader will have altogether forgotten the beginning!  Will there be more questions?  Most assuredly!  Will there be more exclamations?  Inevitably!  Will the need to deploy unusual punctuation have the concomitant effect of inciting me to accompany these unaccustomed marks with unaccustomed words and phrases and in general a more elaborate style of expression?  A distinct possibility!  Or maybe I’ll go in entirely the other direction and start writing in txt cos it wd b ezy 2 do u no lol k c u l8r

Christina has been watching Luther and observed that there’s a bit that would make a very useful gif, and somebody made it for her.  I shan’t reblog it because animated gifs cause problems for some people but if you want Idris Elba shaking his head and saying ‘You need to stop’, here it is.

If you aren’t sure whether you want Idris Elba shaking his head and saying ‘You need to stop’, the answer is yes, yes you do.

under the following button, it should say “add and remove”. click that then go to the last tab on the right (should say “following x people”)

Click “Add and remove”, and then on the next page, click the “Following X people” tab. And there you go :)

Yay, thank you!

I realized this morning that there’s something I do when I can’t remember what country someone I follow on Tumblr lives in.  Before today I wasn’t consciously aware that I do this, but I do.

Obviously I try to think whether they’ve mentioned specific things about where they live.  If I can’t remember anything like that that helps, I think about their perspective on the issues they talk about, and whether they situate that perspective geographically and culturally.  Like whether they ever say, ‘Well, here in [x] it’s like this’ or ‘We don’t tend to encounter this in [x]’.

And if I can’t remember them ever doing that, I assume they’re from the US.

Sorry.  That sounds really snarky.  And with a lot of US people I follow I don’t have to do that because they do explicitly recognize that their experiences and viewpoints are not universal.  But it’s still true that if they don’t, it is reasonable and generally accurate to assume they’re from the US.

It isn’t just a Tumblr thing, of course.  In fact the US people I encounter on Tumblr are much less likely to assume their circumstances are universal than US people on the internet as a whole.  Maybe if the whole of my experience of USians had been from Tumblr I wouldn’t have learned this unconscious way of reading people’s behaviour.  But even here you get things like this:

Well, I hate to break it to all of you douchebags, but that’s not how freedom of speech works. Freedom of speech is derived from the first amendment to the Bill of Rights of the United States of America.

Yup.  Apparently the US Bill of Rights is the source of freedom of speech everywhere in the world.

I’m not linking to the post because it would be unfair to single this person out just because they happened to exemplify a widespread phenomenon on the day I happened to realize something about the way I think.  And I heartily applaud pretty much everything about the post that’s from, and from a quick glance at the writer’s tumblr it looks like they do good work.  But, y’know.  ’Freedom of speech is derived from the first amendment to the Bill of Rights of the United States of America’.  Le sigh.

And, like, I find this annoying while being white and a native Anglophone and born and raised in an OECD country that used to have a massive colonial empire and a lot of the time behaves like it still has.  I say a lot of stuff that mainly or only applies to rich western countries without remembering to make that qualification clear or even to consider whether there are people and places it doesn’t apply to.  So I know how easy it is to do, and I’m not making a personal criticism of anyone.  But the fact that I find it mildly annoying when my circumstances get erased by people from pretty much the only country further up the ladder of international privilege than mine helps me begin to understand viscerally what I’m learning cerebrally, that this is a real problem in social justice discourse (and discourse in general) on the internet.

So I’m going to step up my efforts to stop doing this kind of thing myself.  Because it’s pretty tiresome to be on the other end of, even a little bit.

Tumblr, I am going to tell you what I aim to accomplish today.  This is going to be boring but I’m afraid I’m going to do it anyway, with no regard whatsoever for your entertainedness [warning: probably not a word] because it will make it slightly psychologically harder for me to let myself not do them.  Here they are.

• Hang up that white shirt.
• Hang up that jigsaw-puzzle jacket.
• Read the last two segments I have to read before tomorrow.
• Wash these clothes.
• Find a box to put those things in so I can send them to that person I want to send them to.
• Hang these clothes to dry when they’re washed.
• Order some rat-litter on ye internette.
• Wash up the pan I made lunch in.
• Catch up on Tumblr.
• Reply to my aunt’s e-mail.
• Reply to my other aunt’s e-mail.
• Check for other e-mails and messages I ought to have replied to.

The one of these that is going to be most difficult is catching up on Tumblr, but it’s also the one I have most motivation to do because it requires no more effort than lying on the sofa with my laptop and scrolling.  Both of which are inherently pleasurable.  (Yes, scrolling is inherently pleasurable.  I have a Macbook, so scrolling involves gently stroking a smooth surface.)  I’m so very lazy, Tumblr, you have no idea.

Did I hear someone say ‘Hang up what jigsaw-puzzle jacket?’  That would be this jigsaw-puzzle jacket:

Image is a photograph of me and Fizz at a fancy-dress party some years ago.  It’s the picture from which my current Tumblr / Twitter profile pic is cropped.  I’m wearing a black suit-type jacket that’s been painted largely but not entirely with blue, purple, and silver jigsaw pieces, and there are also a few jigsaw pieces painted on my shirt and my face.  Fizz is dressed as She-Ra and her face is pixellated to protect her identity because, despite being awesome, she does not live on the internet like some of us.