cybergeisha

I recently got my hair done (by the lovely and talented Anna, who I will recommend to anybody!) and am quite happy with it. Why? As you may have guessed, I’m going to Burning Man again this year! Synthetic dreads and a shaved undercut should prove to be a pretty good hairstyle - keep my natural hair from getting in trouble and be pretty non-fussy. (other hair pictures: One, Two)

Preparations to leave are now in full swing - I have less than 10 days before I fly to San Francisco and subsequently leave for Black Rock City.

So here’s a post you TOTALLY CARE ABOUT!

Stuff I’ve Packed Already

• 1 quart plastic bag (*snrk* thanks, airport security!) of small-sized essentials (you know… sunscreen, lotion, toothpaste, deodorant… uh… some other stuff I’ve forgotten in this list…)
• Goggles
• Scarf (you know, to breathe through).
• Sun glasses
• Some basic clothes: band shirts, black cargo capris, two black tank tops, my favorite long black skirt, my favorite medium-length black skirt, and a long, flowy black dress, socks, underwear.
• My priest cassock (yes, this deserved its own line)
• Death Guild Hoodie
• Some costumey fun items to wear at Thunderdome and stuff
• Makeup essentials: one black eyeliner pencil, one taupe eyebrow pencil, a 4-color dark-neutrals eyeshadow palette, reddish lip stain (what, you think I’m going to REAPPLY lipstick? I can even use lip balm over this stuff!)
• Digital Camera (sealed in a plastic bag, duh)
• 1 pair converse all star low-top sneakers (one black shoe, one grey shoe!)
• 1 pair ballet flat style shoes
• Various hair “stuff.” Scrunchies, hair ties, a small bag of little rubberbands for last-minute hair extension repair. Possibly some neat stuff to put IN my hair.
• Two books (Lord of the Rings and The Fabric of the Cosmos, if you’re curious) and a sketchpad (and a pencil, duh)
• A rubber spider for Kurt

This only fills up 1/2 of a carry-on rolling suitcase. Jesus! I’m a NINJA at packing, obviously!

To Be Acquired in San Francisco

(these can be put in the car, do not need to go in my suitcase)

• Pillow (which will have to be borrowed unless I bring my own)
• Sleeping Bag (which I will have to borrow once I get down there)
• Purple awesome New Rocks I’m borrowing from a friend
• Big bag of yogurt covered raisins
• A bag of grapefruits.
• Some hard candies
• A couple of those pre-made tuna salad with crackers thingies

Also, duh, much water and plenty of food, but I’m not going to list all of that. The ones listed are the ones I want to bring as treats. :)

So, I’m sure you all found that INCREDIBLY interesting!

Only nine days to go!

This picture of Carmen, Kurt, Erick and I was taken at the Death Guild Thunderdome fundraiser on Saturday, in San Francisco. Yes, we are all totally awesome.

And here’s Carmen’s totally awesome hair, and me looking amused at Kurt.

U.S. spacecraft lands safely at Mars north pole

Pulled by Mars’ gravity, Phoenix was tearing along at 12,700 mph before it entered the atmosphere, which slowed the craft so it could pop out a parachute and fire thruster rockets to gently float to the ground.

“It’s down, baby, it’s down!,” yelled a NASA flight controller, looking at signals from Mars showing that Phoenix had landed.

I can’t even put into words how excited I was about this landing.

I watched the Phoenix Lander touch down live on TV yesterday afternoon and it was seriously one of the more exciting things I’ve seen in a long time. That “hold your breath” feeling, listening to the mission control live audio feed and watching everyone FLIP OUT when they announced “PHOENIX… PHOENIX HAS LANDED.”

Rock on, Phoenix! :D

Introduction

Readers, fans, random passers-by…. I would like to welcome you to cybergeisha.net’s world première episode of NEWS OF THE WEIRD - weird things I’ve found on the Internet lately. It could be a website, a product, a news story, even a photo or a quote. But above all else, it’s weird, and I’ve got plenty to say about it.

Here, we have our first offering,.

The Crustastun – World’s first Humane Electronic Crustacean Stunner

A revolutionary system For the first time ever a humane, simple and effective way to stun and kill shellfish prior to cooking.

It goes on to explain why they developed this product, further into the website. Let’s take a look, shall we?

To many, present methods of killing (chopping, drowning in freshwater, boiling, frying & basting - alive) are barbaric and the recommended methods (cooling in ice-slurry or spiking the several nerve centres) unproven, difficult and impractical. The Crustastun applies an instant current which anaesthatises the Crab, Lobster or other shellfish within a fraction of a second and kills within seconds.

First of all… If you bought fresh live lobster… You have *GASP* to kill it yourself. You’re setting out to do the age old act ingrained in our DNA — slaughtering something for food. That’s not pretty. I understand that.

But I can’t understand all of this wibbling about “how much pain they can feel” or “what gives them the least pain.” Why? Why focus on this? They will not suffer any more than if they’d been eaten (ALIVE) by another animal. Let’s keep that perspective for a second. Given the choice between “Body Torn Limb from Limb As I’m Eaten Alive” and “Head Chopped Off” and “Boiled Alive” I’d take “head chopped off” or “immediately immersed in boiling water” any day.

The question isn’t, to me, what the lobsters feel or think. It’s what we project onto the lobsters. What WE find horrifying, inhumane, humiliating, mean and wrong, from the perspective of whether we would want to endure it. That’s how we figure out how HUMANE it is.

applies the humane slaughter principles currently applied to higher food animals such as cows, sheep and pigs to shellfish, […]

Higher food creatures. That brings up a really good point. How good ARE our “standards” for “higher” creatures? Pretty good in general. Know why? You don’t usually slaughter a pig, cow, or sheep at your home. Lobsters, fish, shellfish and the like are small enough to be slaughtered at home. So do they need to be held to meat-packing “Standards?”

It’s just a lobster, people.

What was that? You, in the audience. Oh, I see. No, no, it’s a good question. No, I do not eat lobster. It’s not because I think it’s inhumane or too expensive or too messy or anything… I just don’t like them. I don’t like the meat of crustaceans/arthropods so I don’t eat it. It is that simple — no moral high ground here.

The way I see it, they are bugs. Big, ocean-dwelling, arthropods that crawl around in the sea mud. Some people could make the argument that “well, you kill spiders and stomp cockroaches (a very close relative of the lobster), and a lobster is pretty much a bug, too, so…..”

I think it’s more than that. I don’t even know that it’s about “how much pain” a lobster can handle or being “humane.” It seems like it’s more about how much projected pain WE perceive the lobster as going through. How sorry we feel for the lobster through empathy - would you want to be in a tank with your hands tied together, bored, with nothing to do but wait for someone to come and buy you? No. That would be inhumane. But….

————   N E W S   F L A S H ! ! !   ————

LOBSTERS ARE NOT HUMAN

It’s true. As I mentioned before… crustaceans/arthropods are not human and I’m not sure why we keep trying to say that they need to be humanely killed — I view all of the listed methods of lobster slaughtering to be acceptible for what is being achieved.

Maybe we should start “putting down” cows, sheep, and pigs before we kill them, similar to how we do with our pets, rather than inhumanly driving them into a Meat Machine where they will be killed by robots and dismantled ad come out the other side as a side of bacon.

Or maybe as a whole, people should just get over it!

Do we NEED a device SOLELY MADE to “humanely” electrocute lobsters?

My friends, I do not think we need this. It’s just… well, it’s unnecessary, and it makes us seem like we’re a bunch of wussies.

How to use English Punctuation Correctly

With the dawn of the Internet, the birth of Internet slang, and the growing age of SMS, many individuals are forgetting the fundamental aspects of English punctuation. Would you like to write a great paper for one of your classes? Maybe you need to submit a polished, impeccable proposal to your boss? If so, it will help to know proper usage of punctuation. Consider this article a crash course in English punctuation, and read on.

How to use Apostrophes

Do not use apostrophes or quotation marks for emphasis. For example, take a billboard that says: Joe Schmo, the “best” realtor in town! It makes the word “best” appear sarcastic and untrue, rather than emphasized.

Good God, if people would only read these two articles, and nothing else… The Internet would be a better place. I’m sort of a grammar nazi, and abuse of apostrophes, quotation marks, and other punctuational errors sort of break my brain.

Besides, if you don’t pay attention to the article, you risk ending up on the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks or on Apostrophe Abuse. This is your warning, heed it well!

How to Use There, Their and They’re

The English language is full of problems like the one presented by there, their and they’re. Most native English speakers pronounce these words the same way; therefore, it is difficult for some to judge in which situation to use which spelling. Each spelling means a very different thing; if you’d like to learn the difference, read on!

I often worry about the state of the English language. There’s a trend, obviously, towards typing as we speak, as the self on the Internet has become a second version of the physical self. We don’t see the contractions, punctuation marks, pauses, and other such written things as we speak, so once we start using text as a speech medium, of course it’s less and less common to see properly written things.

Good? Bad? I don’t like it but I don’t know whether it will get better. This isn’t a problem of education, or “where are the parents.” It’s deeper than that.