Archive for Social Babble
So I think anti-aging products are more or less B.S.. They don’t make you look any younger, they make you look like someone who spent entirely too much money on lotion with added snake-oil. There’s also the fact that products purporting to make you look more youthful don’t actually have that as their goal. Instead, they’re simply pushing you to look more airbrushed.
One of the side effects of weight loss is slightly flappier skin (well, or seriously flappier skin if you’re dropping 200lbs). This works in reverse – you can smooth out wrinkles by adding on some weight, thus why larger people often have less fine lines on their face then their thinner counterparts. Also, another way people will totally mistake you for being younger then you are is how you dress. Give yourself a high ponytail, some glitter on your face, and a Twilight shirt, and you’ll instantly shave away 10 years.
To summarize, here’s how to always appear younger then you are:
1.) Gain weight.
2.) Dress like you just started college.
Or, if you have the sort of “age-defiance” that way too many “beauty” products are pushing these days, *save yourself some money and buy Photoshop instead.
*Well, if you bought the newest Photoshop, you’d be dropping over $600, but your money would be much better spent at least.
Filed under: Social Babble | beauty, youth|No Comments
Packing is going along as well as packing can. Still need to get a few things on Craigslist, still need to try to pawn some items off on friends as well.
Recently spent a glorious couple of days watching Boogiepop Phantom. I really liked the series and need to find more anime like that to watch. Would also love to cosplay as Boogiepop if I get the chance.
Drew and I went to Fallout last night, the theme was “Rain”. Sprinklers and a hose were set up at random places on the ceiling, and lots of people danced around in swimsuits, which was really fun. Then, there was the rather large guy with black swastikas taped to his nipples. Later, I noticed he had a friend, wearing a t-shirt with a swastika on it. Both of them seemed to be socializing quite normally with random other people. Every time I noticed this, I kept thinking of this random pin I got back in high school from some college or another that was trying to recruit me. The pin said, “Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out.” Fallout, being a private fetish-type club, is a safe space for people to express themselves in ways that they might not normally be able to openly express themselves in other circumstances. It seems that this isn’t always a good thing, and I really hope it’s not housing a burgeoning neo-nazi subculture.
And on a final note, we have gone from two cats to one cat. Velutha died this morning, from feline AIDS. She’s been sick for awhile, but it wasn’t until a few days ago that this actually became apparent. It’s hard to tell when you have cats: there’s been more food in the bowl lately, so we knew either one or both of them was eating less. I thought it might have to do with it getting warmer, though, and maybe them eating less to compensate for the heat. Velutha has also been sleeping a lot lately, but she’s always slept a lot. It’s kind of just what cats do. She’s gotten thinner, but it’s only been recently that we’ve noticed that it was significant, as she’s always been thin and didn’t really have all that much weight to lose in the first place. Then she started oozing something from her mouth the other day, and Drew took her to the vet. They confirmed the AIDS (along with lymphonia, I think), and he brought her home along with several medications. This morning, we go to find her to administer the medications and she is nowhere to be found. After an hour of searching we find her dead, under the bed. I suppose at least she got to be close to us as she died, even though we had no idea she was under the bed. Apparently, this might have been something she started out with. She was the last cat in a litter born in a barn, the rest of her siblings eaten by dogs. She was slightly mangled herself and covered with fleas when Drew’s cousin took her in. We only got her four years ago, and she was eight or nine years at death. Anyhow, it’s sad, but it’s probably for the best that it happened now. She would have had to spend about three days in a car pretty soon, which wouldn’t be fun for even the healthiest of cats.
Filed under: misc,Social Babble | anime, fallout, Velutha|No Comments
So I was looking at Walmart’s free samples, as I sometimes do when I get bored. It’s a great opportunity to get free teeny packets of granola and newfangled tampons. Plus, it means I get more in the mail besides bills and junk mail. In any case, there was a free sample to try some Maybelline foundation (err, ‘liquid makeup’). Now, I don’t use foundation. Never have, except for a few times in middle school when my face got hijacked by a bored friend. I’ve been under the impression that the people who do use it use it as either a blemish remover (to hide all those old acne scars, etc) or as a gesso of sorts for the face (i.e. viewing the face as a canvas of sorts for painting makeup and using the foundation as a means to start with an even base, as a geisha would). The free sample of foundation, though, used these as it’s advertising points:
The idea of airbrushed equaling perfection is bad enough, much less the oxymoron of “airbrush natural finish”, which is text further down in the ad. Or, for that matter, the curiousness of considering it natural to have a face completely devoid of any means of the skin being able to breathe. What this did lead me to think about, though, was the uncanny valley.
For those unaware, the uncanny valley is why something almost but not quite human comes across to actual humans as quite disturbing. It explains zombies, as well as people being creeped out by The Polar Express. So I’ve decided that there’s a conspiracy, here, between the makeup industry and lazy animators. It would take some crazy algorithms to produce the sort of chaos necessary to replicate all of the variances of skin shades and body irregularities and eye movements and slight facial changes to make something appear as a real person, and not simply as something eerily close to a person, so close as to be uber-creepy. Such algorithms would take hard work, and it’s just easier to pay off the makeup industry to convince people that pores and irregularities are what’s actually unnatural. Make people look like almost-people, so that the uncanny valley eventually becomes normal, rather then creepy.
On another note, I wonder how a Turing test would deal with humans trying to pass themselves off as robots, rather then robots trying to pass themselves off as humans.
Filed under: Social Babble | makeup, robots, uncanny valley|No Comments
Q: If a group of syrup bottles decided to start a punk rock band, who would play bass?
A: Sid Viscious
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So I randomly made up a theory the other day. See, I’m curious if there’s any significant gender differences in abilities involving hand-eye coordination, specifically with tasks involving aim. What I’m getting at here is the fact that males practice their hand-eye coordination every time they take a leak, whereas females don’t have the necessary appendages to get that practice in. I mean, that’s multiple times a day, every day, that a male is getting in practice here. It’s gotta have some effect, right?
So I figure that’s why I, in general, suck at first person shooters. However, as a female, I get plenty of practice sitting on my butt. This is why I am excellent at Civilization.
Filed under: Social Babble | bad humor, theories|No Comments
I can’t help but feel that much of the discussion on anorexia that takes place online is a bit of a waste. I got distracted and ended up reading this article on Newsweek about anorexia, particularly as it pertains to online groups, on facebook. And it’s like, I read about how pro-ana groups are promoting weight loss of wacky proportions, and I can’t really see how it’s any different then the ads I encounter pretty much every day online. Just right now to see, I go to my food blog and check the Google ads at the top of the page, and there’s two that talk about losing 12 lbs of fat every two weeks. That’s 6 lbs a week, which is insane considering that 2 lbs a week is the maximum amount that one can lose and still be healthy about it. And I find it weird that anyone could enter into a discussion about online weight loss groups, and the crazy things that they’re encouraging, without examining these ads as well. The article specifically mentions a facebook group that got shut down, along with the account of the group’s founder, because the founder used the group to ‘encourage others to post their pictures online and then harshly detail their “problem areas.’ This reminds me of an ad I saw online just a little while ago, showing someone’s midsection who happened to have a bit of a muffin-top (like, not obese or anything, just a bit of a muffin-top), with the text essentially detailing the problem area. it just seems like layers and layers of imitation to me, whereupon when one get’s labeled ‘anorexia’, it’s bad, but any other circumstance is just people doing whatever it takes to become thin and ‘healthy’.
To me, it seems like anorexia, and, for that matter, obesity, are just symptoms of other circumstances, things that aren’t as glamorous to talk about or as easy to pretend to solve as just shutting down a few websites.
In any case, Google Adsense has an ad review thing they’ve added recently, which I just stumbled up on today, and I’m going to use it to filter out some of the ridiculous weight loss stuff on my site. I don’t like the idea that the ads are gunking up my site, and, as I hate it when I go to recipe websites and see weight loss ads, I don’t want visitors to my site to have to experience that as well.
Filed under: Social Babble | advertising, anorexia, facebook|No Comments
