Tears

I don’t say a lot about my feelings about the history of the war over the possession of our planet, although my crazy obsession is well documented in several places. I just want to say, in my opinion, that the human spirit ultimately broke through the ice on a global scale with this one. If it’s really true that the industry owns and shapes our artists for their own benefits and purposes, then the anguish we suffer is our salvation from that evil.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, bless your hearts, but please open your eyes.

 

Can robotics fix the rape debate?

There is a big twitter argument over the word rape. Activists and arguments abound on twitter, and while I don’t generally get involved, I skim through some of what comes in on my feeds. I’m currently following around 2000 people, most of whom I sort into lists, but I’m a speed reader and sometimes look over my raw incoming stack in real time.

It looks like some people are insisting that forced sex isn’t necessarily rape for several reasons. I could care less about joining the argument. Rather, I wonder if it would be helpful to point out that forcing anyone to do anything they don’t want or like at that moment is a humiliation. Humiliating each other isn’t cool. Humiliating someone is belittling them as a person. Even if forcing someone to be your sex object doesn’t physically hurt them and only ruffles a few feathers, it is still a humiliation.

I was once married to a pedophile, so I feel qualified to make an observation or two. I’ve also been raped a couple of times, so I have opinions. I’m not going to tell those stories here. I think it’s more behooving to share what I’ve learned about other people going through these experiences on both sides. The number one thing I learned is that it’s human nature not to believe anyone could do something like that if you’ve never experienced it for yourself. (This applies across the board to all kinds of behaviors.) I was told by some very nice Christians that I was making things up, watching too much TV, wanting attention, and it couldn’t be that bad. Since I didn’t get one single awww and pat on the head, I like to point out that I don’t strive for negative attention because it has simply never worked for me, but neither does being honest and asking for help, apparently. Other people I’ve met who grew up being used for sex tend to talk in code. They put the truth out there for a blind and deaf society, while a seedy underground thrives all around. Then there are the people who do the using. They have every justification on the tips of their tongues- they’re not really hurting anyone, sex is a natural thing, it only takes a few seconds or minutes, and so on. The subtlest justifications come from parents who use small children, or even babies. The stupidest justification is money- anything can be winked away if it’s a product you pay for, even if the people involved are obviously under legal age.

How about we say it like this- If someone cries, it was rape. If someone feels embarrassed and can’t talk about it, it wasn’t nice sex. If someone carries a lifetime scar that gets in the way of having normal social interaction that leads to normal consensual intercourse, yes, it was hurting someone to force a few minutes doing something they didn’t want to do. If it’s something you can’t reveal in regular group setting because someone will get mad at you and call the police, yeah, that’s rape.

I can’t decide if the masked twitter accounts decrying the definition of rape are real people who support sex abuse or vigilantes stirring up response by playing devil’s advocate. This banter in my feeds is only the flotsam and jetsam on the surface a thriving industry, and ultimately a great distraction from that. Since free speech allows questionable materials to be printed or filmed and sold while navigating delicately around the law, it seems to me that human trafficking has more support from all sides than it does rescuers, and until we come to grips with turning our eyes away from that which is delicate, we can hardly define that which is indelicate. Telling someone they can rent a video and watch but not enact for themselves is pretty ridiculous. I vote we find a way to merge these thought processes so we can truly go forward. I see cheers going up on twitter over statements like one of the jobs robots are being developed for is prostitution. How much you want to bet that only drives the price up on black market human trafficking? How soon will we see printed materials specializing in humans being raped by robots?

I’ve had many years to think about these things. I keep saying there’s a book…

Zombie Robot Radio

A lot of people say they don’t remember their dreams, but I vividly remember my dreams in minute detail, thanks to a sleep disorder called Alpha Wave Interrupted Sleep. Suddenly coming awake fully alert during a REM sequence for me is like screen snipping an HD DVD playing in my laptop, it freezes the action and impresses it like a video onto my brain, with the perk of being able to roll it back and forth through the action because brains are better screen snippers than laptop hard drives are.

My diagnosis was a little too spectacular, literally being booted out of a sleep clinic a few years ago for not sleeping, but thankfully the 4 hours I did spend there were productive enough to be told later in a doctor’s office that I have some pretty solid alpha-delta wave crashes. The lab tech was a little cranky, something about sleeping only 20 minutes and wasting their time, but that was probably exaggerated. Wonder what it does to their brain waves to sit and stare at a monitor expectantly waiting for something to happen with my brain waves. I could never get through a job like that, I’d go mental in a week flat.

At any rate, I’m living proof that sleep deprivation doesn’t necessarily kill you or make you crazy (my siblings mock that part), having been like this all of my life, but the remembering the dreams part sure makes it more interesting. O_O Like popping awake to this one today. Some radio jock was yapping catchy  “Listen Live” commentary behind what was like watching a TV movie and being in it at the same time. Creepy and spooky are good words for coming home to things being moved around, sometimes shattered or thrown across the floors, new items showing up, discovering doors being unlocked upon arriving home, signs of violence and possibly death but too much missing evidence to conclude what happened. And then waking up to stuff having happened while we were asleep. And then discovering a disturbed nephew had moved his vagrant self into our house behind our backs and seemed to think he owned the place now, and realizing it was clearly a matter of time before we would be executed and cleared out as junk after police discovered another house where that had already happened. I was up to the point in the dream where Scott and I were planning our escape in two different vehicles kind of blocked in the driveway (btw, this wasn’t my real house at all, I have no idea where all this new stuff comes from in my head, because my own driveway would have been ridiculously easy to get out of), and I was terrified that I’d left my phone behind and wouldn’t be able to contact Scott because he evidently hadn’t escaped behind me…. The sudden waking up part made the running “Listen Live” commentary more prominent and it kept playing for about a minute while I boinged out of bed to get coffee.

The neat part of sleep deprivation and remembering your dreams is getting to figure out what inspired the dreams, like having an inbuilt daily puzzle to solve. They say dreams help us build neural pathways (my brain must be *packed*) and organize information. The content doesn’t seem to be that important, but I can usually pinpoint where the bits and pieces come from. Last night’s dream’s inspirations came from a local murder-suicide event (people we sort of knew), my penchant for listening to internet radio and podcasts, and skimming through The Walking Dead preshow warm up and live tweet commentary in my twitter feed in the wee hours between the tossing and turning. I know it doesn’t come from watching the zombie shows themselves, as you can imagine, I avoid live tense drama shows (especially with mutilation and blood) because my nightmares already get pretty horrific as it is, and remembering them as vividly as I do makes me feel pretty ill, really don’t need outside prompts triggering more images, although the stuff I come up with in my dreams seems to far outstrip anything I’ve ever seen on television. (I disturbed my psychologist with one in particular that prompted a discussion on becoming the next Stephen King, perhaps.) Point is, I LOVE spoilers because they dissipate that kind of tension and I don’t watch the shows anyway, so radio is my first choice for anything zombie.

This pic clicks to that feed list I mentioned.

I’ve been making private zombie jokes about older relatives and especially ever since Scott revealed his zombie escape plan to me about 15 months ago during a scary bout of heat exhaustion prompted vasculitis and mega meds, and of course, Scott is a devoted Walking Dead fan, so I get reports on his water cooler yap from work all the time. I also get some pretty hilarious blow by blow commentary on the We’re Alive podcast along with Walking Dead stuff from SnarkAlec Radio. Actually, that’s why I listen to podcast/internet radio commentary, because it’s so funny I can’t help listening, and between that and twitter I think probably beats watching the shows myself anyway. I’m able to keep up with the TV fandoms in great shape, only sacrificing actual watch time, plus I get a whole new set of real time interaction that beats watching Talking Dead because it’s more personally touchable via live tweet, whereas Talking Dead is just a specialized talk show. Don’t get me wrong, me and Chris Hardwick go way back, but admiring from afar doesn’t hold a cool scented candle to being able to interact in real time with a whole group of hard core zombie addicts on the SnarkAlecs Radio show on the Loud N’ Loaded station. These pictures click to the recorded shows on Tony Solo’s YouTube channel.

Tony Solo holding up a dried up ‘wound’ that fell off the previous week during the Halloween show and petrified.

From the Halloween show

And if you’d rather watch gurlz doing zombie talk there is Bring Out Your Geek, with back videos at Yeung Jeans’s Videos on Vimeo, and more likely to add in the finer points of Doctor Who, pinterest, Quinto… you know, the good stuff. This pic clicks to the webishow page.

You don’t have to miss out on the zombie craze just because you don’t like looking at zombies or because they give you nightmares. You can join in the fun with real people, follow them on facebook and twitter, and yap it up like a pro because you’re keeping up with the commentary.

brain sex, robot style

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
      If this be error and upon me proved,
     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 is my favorite. I’ll never forget the first time I heard my favorite line- “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”

I could care less about romantic love. Scott says something is wrong with me and I’m ruined, but I can’t stop giggling when frogs pop into my mind in the middle of it. I think, for me, the real connection is a brain thing. Personally, I believe the roots of true love start between parent and child, and that whole alteration thing is about accepting each other for who we are and not feeling compulsed to fix or change each other to suit our own whims. Still, this sonnet sparks a little deep thought (I’m not using it in context as discussed at Shakespeare’s Sonnets).

Going forward, strong caution on this post. Maybe I should have titled it Sexual Synesthesia and Asperger’s or something, but I think the title I’ve got is catchier. I’m putting this post out there as a ‘forewarned is forearmed’ before I get super serious and put this stuff into one of the books I’m working on. This book in particular will look at the darker side of growing up with Asperger’s, although there is plenty of cute to go around as well, like in aspie lovin’, which I think fits perfectly with Sonnet 116.

I describe the synesthesia I live with at Synesthesia. I’ve written about my sexuality sysnesthesia in the following posts, so I’ll leave that up to readers to play catch up, because I think it’s redundant to say it all again. I’ve read them so I’m going to skip down to the next paragraph.

sex is wrong, or coming out of the pandimensional closet

Lexx and psychological health, perhaps

Twitter friends have been having fun joking with me about whether I am a robot (it’s the world’s greatest pickup line, & the robot name variations on Pinky keep growing- Pinky 5, Pink-E, Pink3PO), little knowing the depths of chaos theory I’ve investigated and what that portends for artificial intelligence. I keep saying I’m not a big fan of robots, but over the last few days it’s become apparent that I’m actually quite familiar with a plethora of scifi robot characters, including androids, cyborgs, and synthetics. My most favoritist robot is the Electric Monk from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. I’ve also touched a little on brain studies in a number of classes, and although I’m no expert, I’m probably more familiar with the human brain than most people I meet. From physical and psychological development to the philosophies of self and existence and all the weird fiction I can get in between, I seem to have had a fixation on brain stuff most of my life.

A couple of the neatest things I like about brains is the inherent propensity for symbology and mapping. Even simple brains must associate recognizing something in the outer environment as a memory of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in relation to what the organism feels compelled get done in its life, and by the time brains reach the size of walnuts there is already extensive social mapping. Humans are so brainy that symbols take on multilayers of meaning and context, allowing us to enjoy things like sarcasm, while mapping grows so complex that humans literally invent more things to map just to keep mapping, resulting in a gaming industry that is currently rocking the planet.

I’m uniquely interested in these kinds of things because, while I am in no way mentally deficit, I am socially deficit and have spent my life putting extra time into figuring other people out and how I fit into their viewpoints. The kinds of thoughts I have are not the kinds of thoughts people around me generally have, and general consensus is that my kinds of thoughts occur because something is inherently wrong with me to begin with. None of us knew for years that I skirt the fringe of autism, although my poor mother suspected long before it was fashionable for definitions to stretch out and allow little things like the word ‘verbal’, because I really don’t shut up, and it’s usually not long before most people find me very annoying.

One of my favorite fiction authors for retrospective thought on thought itself is Douglas Adams. Like the Grebulon ship, there seems to be a hole where my central mission module belongs. If you’re the sort of brainiac who loves brain melt puzzle thinking and you haven’t heard of these things, click those links right now. I’ll wait for you.

I’ve often said I feel like I should be able to plug into other people like R2D2 plugs into a wall socket to get information. I’ve had to go out of my way to learn the social dance etiquettes that most people pick up on automatically while they’re still children. I tend to prefer function over form, which makes me obnoxiously rude sometimes, the way people in Star Trek might think Vulcans are rude, but it’s cool because I tend to think of them back the way Vulcans think about humans, so we’re even. All the same, it’s a relief to me when I find ways to expedite interactive processes because having to route around all the extra words of ‘how was your day’ without lapsing into literal interpretation kind of wears me out. Once I finally realized I don’t have to actually diagnostically report in, life got a little easier.

The internet is a godsend for me. It is exactly what I want when I interact. Words go straight into my head without the social cues, and oddly, I actually get the social stuff just fine like this, although other people still inject emotion into the content I share and that mystifies me. I’m starting to get the hang of subtext, but I find it disturbing that other people don’t find it disturbing how prevalent subtext really is. What is the point of language and symbolic exchange if words are rife with unspoken words and don’t exactly mean what they look like they say? But, again, once I realized that it’s more like playing a game, things got a little easier. All the same, even though information exchange on the internet is blissful for me, if that’s all it is then it’s kind of sad. I do, after all, need human contact, so I am learning to say ‘Hello, how was your day’ on a keyboard. Irony and I are bedfellows.

Brain sex is a phrase I coined a few years ago to describe to myself the thrill I get connecting to other people and their ideas and enthusiasm on the internet. I don’t necessarily need to play the comment-on-each-other’s-blogs game, but it’s fun to run into stimulating ideas coming out of other brains. I kind of feel like this is Borg Basic or something. The internet started out being an extension of our brains, but now our brains have become extensions of the internet. Whatever is going on, I like it. Twitter especially is a mental polyamorist’s dream come true (and therein lies the scandal in using the world’s greatest pickup line, perhaps).

Brain sex is only a metaphor, you say. Ah, but I experience real chemical changes or chemical reinforcements when I play on twitter, I say. I think we all do. Talking to each other is titillating to the point where stronger bonds are made in 140 characters or less than are made in chat rooms and forums, which in their day made stronger bonds than between people living next door to each other. Twitter has become a living thing, a self organizing system efficiently channeling like thinkers together.

The thrill for a brain gamer like me is the quantity one can get into a thought that is restricted to a tiny configuration. Word construction rules fly out the door in favor of packing space, and people who get really good at it can actually receive twitter awards. Knowing a few word tricks can get a person’s twitter content picked up by internet publications, and it’s been all the rage on other media to follow hashtag feeds on twitter as a way of sampling what a general population is thinking about this or that. But again, it’s the connection to actual people in real time that brings the satisfaction. I like feeling like I’m part of the world, maybe special enough to be part of a twitter gang.

But it’s not often I run into someone who can stop me dead in my tracks with four words, certainly no one had ever done it before on the internet until about 5 days ago on twitter. I have no idea what any of it means outside of my own head, but I think I have found someone who can brain game with me without having to fake it. I could be wrong, but it sure felt like brain sex to me.

I’ve been torn the last few days, but if I’m going to play the subtext game, I think I’m going with “Yes, I am a robot.” If you’ve come this far and missed it, I’m talking about the Asperger’s. Kinda took the question literally, but since it was my first time being the recipient of the world’s greatest pickup line, I had to work my way through the logic loops and construct loop counters when I couldn’t find my way out of the maze. I’m a really advanced robot.

Are you a robot?

T- Pinky is still waiting for me to ask her if she is a robot.

D- well, why won’t you ask Pinky if she’s a robot then?

T- its the worlds greatest pickup line and she’s married, it would be scandalous.

P- I’m in existential crisis today. I may or may not be a robot.

T- So are you a Robot?

The entire conversation took roughly about 15 hours because it was on twitter and I had to think about it, and I never really answered the question.

From Cyborg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“According to some definitions of the term, the metaphysical and physical attachments humanity has with even the most basic technologies have already made them cyborgs.”

At 3:37 a.m. this morning I bifurcated into Schrodinger’s messy kitteh dilemna. Is the cat alive or dead? Am I a robot or not? The world’s greatest pickup line threw me right out of spacetime and I’ve spent my day sort of crash floating through philosophical giggles that I can barely translate into an explanation to my own self.

So I’m in two states of mind. Spock and Spongebob went to their respective corners and came out duking at the bell. Because if I’m a robot, what does that mean? I say I’m ready for the brain implants, but I’d really miss the crazy chemicals surging around my brain coils like tron bikes, because my horoscope was right on track this morning.

Just yesterday I had briefly flirted with the idea of a writing challenge around synchronicity and forwent it for yapping on twitter instead.

So I was already primed for today to happen. I’ve been angsting about Xanga and my book launch and so many other things going on this last year that it was a pleasure to angst over being asked the world’s greatest pickup line today. The thrill of someone taking a little time to point a nerf gun at me on twitter and ping my head a few times through the day was intoxicating.

But the real question is the subtext. Am I a robot? I’m not sure the answer is as important as playing into the word ‘scandalous’, which for some reason has made today really fun and funny and ricocheted me back through several years of sweet memories- what I wouldn’t give to find a copy of the long lost Willy Wonka (CATCF) version of this song on youtube.

T- So are you a Robot?

P- it *is* the world’s greatest pickup line.

T- so are you?

P- stepping carefully around ‘scandalous’ which by ur definition earlier just happened, but I’m really enjoying it, so what the heck

REALLY enjoying it…

The last time I felt like this was 2007. The memory will always consume me, the only memory in my life that truly consumes me almost daily, even now. My only recourse is to get it written out of my soul, just get dirty and deal with the deeply twisted concepts of life and love and the razor claws of pseudo fate that rip our avatars into lies.

This time I will be okay.

:edit: 11-4-13 This continues….

You can click the next one to get to that facebook post.