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So, there's this SeaWorld debate. And there was a roundtable discussion.
And in response to a question about whether captivity was unhealthy for orcas, the SeaWorld dude brought out a chart showing that orca longevity in captivity used to be super-terrible, but now it's about on par with survival in the wild.
Dude, you are making the opposite point to the one you want. That's, "Well, obviously it's been terrible, but we've finally caught up and now it's arguably not actively detrimental if you do it really, really well!!!"
Just... no. You are only making a case for animal captivity if they live significantly longer.
For example, circa 2009 at least, there was a female example of the extremely endangered Amur tiger (formerly known as the Siberian tiger, but there aren't any in Siberia any more) at the Highland Wildlife Park. Which kept seeming wrong to me, because for some reason I think of tigers as hot climate animals, but... no, Siberian, and the Highland Wildlife Park sort of seems to specialise in colder animals. They had recently acquired an elderly polar bear who'd been at Edinburgh Zoo, but in her old age had started to struggle with the overwhelming heat of Edinburgh, so had been moved to the Highlands because it's really quite cold there.
But they also had the tiger, and I had a long chat with the keeper, and one of the things about this tiger was that she was unlikely to survive in the wild. She'd had some health issues, and one of the consequences was that she needed to eat every day, where apparently wild tigers would usually eat every two or three days, and she'd be at risk of starving... especially since she had three cubs to rear.
She was a perfect candidate for captivity, therefore, because she was healthier there, and protected from threats like poachers. (And raising cubs! Which were adorable yet, clearly, also incredibly annoying sometimes. She was trying to eat, the cubs kept trying to get at her food, she had to roar at them as they tried all sorts of tricks, it was hilarious and cute and also kind of terrifying because a tiger's roar at close proximity sends RUN MONKEY RUN signals that hit straight to the hindbrain.)
However, had the argument for keeping her in captivity been: "Well, these days they live just about as long as they do in the wild!" that would not have been a good argument.
I should note: I'm not actually a huge fan of killer whales. They're only misnamed in the "whale" part, not the "killer" part, and they're sort of terrifying in some ways. That doesn't, however, mean that I approve of their imprisonment, torture, or early death.
I'm also not a particularly vociferous animal-rights advocate. I have no problem with people keeping domesticated animals as pets and I eat meat. But I am against animal cruelty, and that applies to animals that aren't cute. I don't find most fish cute, either, but I consider catch-and-release recreational fishing to be one of the most horrendous activities undertaken by humans for "sport", too.
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I may be a bit running late on particularly thoughtful commentary, but I still want to rant slightly on something that's annoyed me recently: to wit, people calling out Mark Cuban as a bigot for saying he'd cross the street to avoid a black youth in a hoodie or a white skinhead.
Primarily because: yes that's bigoted and that was his entire point. Essentially, it could be boiled down like this:
Mark Cuban: I think everyone has prejudices. I, for example, have these reactions in certain circumstances, which is totally bigoted of me, but what's important is what we say and do, not what we think.
Certain Sections Of The Media: YOU ARE A BIGOT YOU HAVE PREJUDICES
Me: What is wrong with you?
Because he actually made a very good and true point. You can't help your prejudices, at least not in the short term. But you *can* decide how you're going to act, and what you're going to say.
Having racist thoughts doesn't make you a bad person, doing racist things does.
I'm now going to talk about my parents in a way that they might not like, but this is an important thing to me.
My parents both grew up in South Africa. Obviously there was pervasive, thoroughly institutionalised racism in all sorts of areas and ways all around them. Neither of them liked it, enough that they decided they didn't want to raise their children in South Africa the way it was or was becoming, and in 1982 they left their homeland and their extended families to move to a foreign country they had never even seen, for the sake of a better life for me and my sister.
I am in awe of the courage of that decision, the sacrifice they made.
However, as I've grown older and watched *them* grow older too, I've become more and more aware of another, ongoing campaign they've been fighting against the influence of the Old South Africa, all my life and possibly all of theirs.
See, my parents are both firmly agreed that Racism Is Bad. But they hail from a society that was deeply, insidiously racist, and a certain amount of prejudice seeped into them nonetheless.
And from what I can tell, they've spent their whole lives fighting it, and fighting even more not to pass those attitudes to their children.
With an adult's perspective, I can recognise the way my parents have, in defiance of average behaviour, become more liberal as they get older, generally speaking. But I can also, thinking back, recall the times when my parents would freeze, just for a fraction of a second, and then be firmly positive in their totally-not-racist reaction to something.
The impression I'm left with is that sometimes my parents' instinctive reactions to things are racist, but my parents are better people than that, and have made the deliberate decision that those thoughts will not decide their actions.
And I admire that. I think it shows tremendous strength of character, I really do. Throughout my childhood I was taught that people of other races are sometimes different, but never lesser. That differences should be respected - you should pronounce people's names properly, even if they're foreign to you, that you should respect their customs when you are their guest, and try to make them feel comfortable when they are yours.
It was my mother, I'm fairly certain, who told me the story of the great society lady hosting a dinner in honour of a foreign ambassador - the kind of dinner where there are a dozen different forks, with "correct" cutlery for every course. When the soup was served, the ambassador, to the shock of many guests, picked up his bowl and drank from it directly, rather than using the soup spoon, tipping it only away from him, and slurping decorously.
Whereupon the hostess, with utmost poise, lifted her own soup bowl and drank from it, then continued her conversation as if nothing was amiss. Some guests followed suit, others did not, but the ambassador was not embarrassed by his error at all.
I have, on occasion, become the instant favourite of friends' foreign relatives simply because, when introduced to them, I listen closely to their names and make sure I'm pronouncing them correctly. To me, this is the most basic of politeness, because if you're casually mispronouncing their name, how are you doing anything but casually disregarding everything about them that doesn't fit your own cultural preconceptions?
... post locked because it's very rambly and off-the-cuff trying to think through things.
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So, the road outside our house is being resurfaced today and tomorrow. I woke up at 7 (having got to bed late and slept badly) to the shrill beeping of a reversing truck outside my window, and since then it's been grinding and jackhammers and the very ground vibrating and steamrollers and all of that is like fingernails on the blackboard of my soul, only it's combined with this *other* annoying thing, in that when I woke up this morning I got the hiccups, and somehow managed to hiccup with my torso twisted completely wrong and I have pulled one of the connecting muscles on my ribcage.
So every time I breathe, it hurts, and sometimes I breathe wrong and the pain spikes and my breath catches and I have to rearrange and very very carefully consciously manage the next breath, and when I breathe consciously it tends to take me ages to be able to go back to breathing automatically, which is also very annoying.
I have a tension headache. It arrived early.
RARGH
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Once upon a time, I had a nightmare.
It was a very vivid nightmare, too. It felt as real as waking reality does, and it hurt.
The premise was simple. I dreamed I had killed myself. I dreamed my death, but that wasn't the bad part. The bad part was that I didn't end because my life did, and amid the drifting peace of the afterlife I saw the pain I'd caused.
My mother sobbing in the arms of my father, whose face was twisted with grief as tears tracked down his cheeks. My closest friends crying, falling apart, all of them wracked with loss and guilt, all blaming themselves for something I knew was entirely my own fault.
I watched people hurt, people I love, and I knew I caused it. Knew I could have prevented it, knew it didn't have to be that way, but that it was too late now to prevent it. I saw that I had left wounds that wouldn't heal, but I couldn't go back and fix it...
... but then I woke up. I woke up crying, at first with the indescribable pain of it, and then with relief because it hadn't happened after all, and I still had the chance before me not to make that choice.
If there is anything of truth in the doctrine that suicides are condemned to Hell, I think that that is it. I can imagine no torture more painful. Physical pain is nothing, not really. I broke my leg in three places once, and it very definitely hurt, but it didn't hurt nearly as deeply. Remembering my broken leg doesn't hurt. Remembering this dream does.
Sometimes I wish everyone had had a dream just like it.
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Scenario: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya and I are talking and having hugs, late in the evening. velithya has just been talking about how much work she has to do for upcoming assessments in her course, and is a bit stressed about it.
She concludes by thanking me for things I have been doing to help and try to keep her from needing to worry about other things.
velithya: So thank you. You could make my life so much more difficult if you wanted to.
sami: Aww. *snuggles close* I would never intentionally make your life more difficult. *pause* Unless it was really funny.
velithya: *bursts out laughing*
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So my housemate is into basketball, and somewhat follows the NBA. I vaguely follow his following it, and I have something of a favourite team at the moment.
It's the San Antonio Spurs, and when my housemate was catching me up on which teams he was following when he was inviting me to watch some playoff games with him (me not having watched any basketball since the last playoffs), he reminded me which team it was by reminding me it was the team with Sad Puppy.
Sad Puppy is awesome.
You have to understand, I'm not actually great with names to begin with, and I hadn't paid attention to basketball in a year, and the players move around too much to be able to read their shirts very well. So I generally have nicknames for most of the players based on what I remember about their appearance and/or behaviour.
Sad Puppy is actually named Tim Duncan, but even though I know that now I still sometimes call him Sad Puppy, because the thing that caught my attention and recollection about him is that he is always making these utterly tragic expressions.
I know he's just concentrating and serious, but seriously, he makes such tragic faces and I just always want to go and give him a hug. It's okay, Sad Puppy! You're really good at this! Don't be so sad, Sad Puppy!
The Spurs also have a number of other good and awesome players, of course. But secretly I probably wouldn't love them if not for Sad Puppy.
(Although the Spurs also, recently, let me vent my own residual national resentment. A player from the other team had been leaning hard into Genobili, who turned that into a foul that became a tech foul when the coach got enraged by it, iirc, by way of Genobili falling over. Basically, he took a dive. To which, of course, I said: "Well, of course he dived. He's Italian." Because I'm possibly not going to be over that until Fabio Grosso is stripped of citizenship, or something, even though I actually really like Genobili.)
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So, in my ongoing, yet intermittent, effort to improve my sketching skills, I'm currently working on a pencil portrait of RuPaul.
Who is African-American.
This, of course, means now I'm having to relearn noses entirely, and I am mad at the entirety of humanity right now because noses are hard and I resent this.
Noses are pretty much the hardest feature on a face to draw as it is, because there's almost no real *lines* to them, and yet if you don't get them right it throws the whole face out, so it's just this subtle shading thing that's tricky and usually takes me a million years to get right.
And then you draw a person of a different race, and it's a whole new thing in a way that other features just don't... feature.
See, eyes aren't such a big deal. Shape variations are nothing because eyes have defined lines - the borders between whites and irises and eyelids are all very clear. Mouths are tricky to get really right, but individual mouth differences don't make much difference on most people, because it's a rare person who doesn't have definition in the distinction between face generally and lips.
But noses. They're just... bumps. There's only definition around the nostrils and the... I don't know, corner bits outside the nostrils, whatever they're called, and why does the entire human race have such stupidly vague protrusions on their faces?
You may think they're not vague on some people, but you would be wrong. One of my housemates has as well-defined and Roman a nose as you can generally find outside of, I don't know, eagles, and in pencil sketch terms I can assure you it is VAGUE BUMPS.
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I'm trying to start posting and reading DW again.
Things I Did Today include:
- Getting barefoot into a car not my own, carefully avoiding stepping on the broken glass in the footwell, to move the car a foot to the right, and having an embarrassingly long delay in the process because I had to work out how to put it in reverse.
("So, it's left of first and up, but it won't go... push down? Pull up? Are there any buttons, maybe, or is the left displaced up or down? ... Oh, there's a little ring I can pull up!")
Because my housemate's car window got smashed last week while he was off working somewhere I *believe* is probably a minesite, but I don't really know the details, but anyway, he's out there again this week.
I seemed ridiculously incompetent this morning when the woman from the glass repair people called to confirm the car's details, I'm sure, but the woman's professionally faint tone of frustration at my stupidity, apparently not knowing pretty much anything about the details of the car's make and model, vanished when I explained: "It's my housemate's car, not mine, but he's working FIFO."
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So, my computer had a virus.
(It's not the whole reason I haven't posted in so long, but it's part of it.)
It was quite an unusual virus, in my experience, not least because it infected my computer, which no virus had ever done before. The symptoms were odd. Eradicating it was tricky.
I shall now describe the events in detail, because if other people get the same thing, they might want to spend less time trying to fix it than I did.
The first phase was odd, and we spent a fair amount of time thinking it might be a hardware issue, heat-related or something. It was characterised by a curiously progressive freezeup. First any background applications would go unresponsive, then Windows itself would, and finally the active application would hang.
Meanwhile, the hard drive light would be solid on, without so much as a flicker.
When I tried having Task Manager up before the crash started, nothing whatsoever showed as out of the ordinary or overactive in any way.
The system Event Log showed nothing.
At first, the crashes were happening with bizarre regularity, close on to every two hours. However, when I went to back up my data, all that changed.
Due to past bad experiences with forgetting to back up something in an odd corner of the hard drive and being sad when I realised I lost it, my preferred method of backing up before I do something drastic is to copy the entire contents of my hard drive to something else.
However, when I tried to do that this time, there were a couple of noticably odd things:
First, Windows Explorer appeared to conclude that the entire contents of my c:\ drive amounted to something like 25.7GB. This is not even close.
Second, the attempt to copy files set off the crash well ahead of schedule, and triggered a change in behaviour such that the crash would now happen more-or-less as soon as the computer booted.
In Safe Mode, however, I was still able to back up my files - which I did by copying them across to the other hard drive in the same computer, and believe me, it turns out I'm very glad I got a laptop that has two hard drives - but the computer was still instacrashing if it loaded normally.
So, files secure, I did a factory reset on my Windows partition. Did all the install stuff, then immediately downloaded a fresh copy of Microsoft Security Essentials, updated the virus definition, and set it to scan everything. Left that to run overnight...
... and in the morning discovered that it had crashed. Tried to go again, but the crash happened as soon as Windows loaded.
While I reinstalled Windows again, I had a long chat about all of this with my father, who's rather an expert on all things software, and he recommended that I outright hard-format the drive.
While we were discussing this, and I was poking around in Disk Manager, I noticed something out of place: a drive I didn't recognise.
Disk Manager was seeing my C:\ partition (HDD 1), my D:\ partition (HDD 2), my E:\ partition (HDD 1), my DVD drive (holding the system recovery DVD), and a strange, mysterious 8 GB drive that claimed to be a Sandisk SD card.
The thing is, while my laptop does have an SD card slot, as I very carefully verified, that slot was holding a piece of SD-card-shaped plastic designed, I assume, to keep dust out of the slot, but absolutely resolutely in no way more advanced technologically than "moulded plastic". There was no SD card.
My dad looked up the specs for my laptop online, and could find absolutely no mention of there being some kind of SD card onboard for any reason. I recalled no such thing, either.
According to Windows, the SD card did not contain readable data of any kind; Windows opined it was data intended to be read by a different operating system.
My laptop does not have and has never had any other operating system.
So I disabled that "drive", and reinstalled Windows. I nuked the c:\ and e:\ partitions but didn't actually do a full hard format.
Lo and behold! My computer worked. I even re-downloaded Security Essentials, updated it, and successfully ran a full scan of everything (which picked up nothing).
I've never before heard of a virus that hides itself as a fake SD card, but it's my best theory on this one.
There's actually a bit more to the saga of My Recent Computer Troubles, but it's not virus-related, and this post is quite long, I think, so the odd, quirky hardware incident that followed can be another post.
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So I'm pretty sure Gran Turismo has made me a better driver.
Two incidents spring to mind on our recent trip: the first, when two tyres blew out on a narrow bridge at 50mph, and I stayed entirely in my lane and didn't so much as scratch the paintwork on the car as I drove it off the bridge and pulled over further along, where there was shoulder to pull over on.
The second was when I came around a curve at about 90km/hr (we were in Canada) to find a deer sproinging cheerfully across the road.
Braking sharply *while cornering* is fairly high on the list of things I was taught Not To Do when I was learning to drive, because it is, in fact, a spectacular exercise in the Applied Physics Of Wrecking Your Car.
Nonetheless, I braked sharply, and reflexively compensated to keep control of the car, successfully.
The thing is, I don't think I used to be quite as good at dealing with cars bobbling like that, and add to that I've barely driven a car at all in the last few years. (I've never owned a car, though when my mother was ill I drove my parents' car constantly, but riding a motorcycle is a *rather* different experience.)
However, I have played a fair amount of Gran Turismo, and one of the things that I *definitely* had to learn in that game is how to cope with cars going slightly out of control. Gran Turismo is a good simulation of that stuff, and I had to learn how to correct for a lot. Now, in GT generally the reason the car is at frequent risk of bobbling is that I am driving at speeds that, in the real world, would qualify as "suicidally insane", but, you know... racing video game. Nonetheless, the general principles are the same.
Arguably, this probably helps for the translation of the skills into a real car. The conditions I've learned to handle in Gran Turismo are far more extreme, because it's coping with a control issue when I'm already driving at the limit of the car's control to begin with; since I do not, in the real world, in a real car, drive with the accelerator buried in the floor except for those moments when I stop accelerating to brake as hard as I can for a corner nonetheless taken as fast as I can wrestle the car around the curve before flooring it again, kinda thing, I have more margin for error.
Having said that, I did take a couple of corners in North America marginally faster than I was quite comfortable with, but that was not intentional. Certain sections of road - generally when going through mountains - are really extremely twisty, and there's a section of the Trans-Canada Highway where the signposted recommended speed is 40km/hr, and all I can say to that is ha ha, you crazy Canadian optimists, because I slowed to 40km/hr, and then the only reason I did not actually yell holy shit the fuck is this AHHHH is that my jaw was clenched and the brain processing power usually assigned to "language, production and recognition" was reassigned to "decreasing radius curve, navigation" and also "terror, not screaming in".
Admittedly there were roadworks, but still. I think I went through the rest of that section at about 25km/hr, slower to go past the mans. I vaguely recall velithya making word-like noises during that first curve but I honestly did not process what they were.
"Too fast" is so very, very much a relative concept.Current Location: Perth, Western Australia
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Nov. 1st, 2013 @ 10:37 pm
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Only two flights made it from Oakland to LAX after the shooting.
We managed to get on the second one.
(We'd stopped in Oakland because our flight was dropping off and picking up passengers. We weren't actually supposed to deplane at all, but more-or-less exactly when we arrived, our flight was cancelled. Along with every other flight.)
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So, I was going to go to the Big Four Ice Caves.
I didn't. On the way, I had a car accident - dodging oncoming traffic drifting into my lane at a narrow bridge on Stevens Pass Highway, the right tyres of my car clipped the kerb and... both were shredded open.
Sooo I got to wait a couple of hours for the tow truck, then ride almost two hours into Seattle, and fix up switching to a new car, aaaand then it was almost dark and I headed back to my motel.
I'm currently planning to try again tomorrow, but I probably won't actually be driving the same road - partly because there's a *lot* of narrow bridges and I'm kind of unnerved, partly because it's an hour longer than the route that takes the freeway by Seattle. (But not through Seattle, so I'm hoping it won't be hideous traffic or anything.)
Having said that, the route I did take is stunningly beautiful. Sadly I don't have photos of most of it, because I was driving, but it was definitely worth the trip.
Although Leavenworth, with its Bavarian Village theme, is cute but kinda disconcerting.
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When a call centre operator asks where I am, and I say, "Washington State," it is a supremely unpromising moment when she replies, "Is that Washington D.C.?"
NO. NO IT IS NOT.
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I'm going on an Adventure today! It involves a nearly four-hour drive each way, which is Long, but the thing about Ellensburg is that it's central; it means that anywhere is at least some way away, but *everywhere* is in *reach*. I am Exploring Washington State.
Of course, getting gluten-free food can be stressful at the best of times, and my destination also includes a long-for-me walk that I might have to accomplish quite slowly, due to bad knee etc, so...
... I'm packing lunch. I bought gluten-free bread and breadrolls before I left Portland, and last night I bought cheese and jam and butter and storage bags at Fred Meyer, and now I am making myself food so I don't have to find food while I am travelling because I am clever.
(Note: I am using a paper plate as a cutting board for the cheese, and a combat utility knife to *cut* the cheese, because clever is not the same as "entirely stocked with kitchen supplies" or, for that matter, "willing to buy a kitchen knife while travelling". Why I have a combat utility knife is a whole 'nother thing. But despite being quite a thick blade it cuts cheese very well.)
Next: ADVENTURECurrent Location: Ellensburg, WA Current Mood: ADVENTURE
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Things I had forgotten about America:
Prescription medications advertised on television.
The side-effect warnings are akind of... what.
"Hey, here's this drug that's awesome for these things! 44% of people found it easier to quit smoking, when only 17% did with sugar pills! By the way, it could kill you, or make you crazy, or just super-sick. Or, seriously, kill you."
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Sooo I came back to my motel room, and was sitting doing things, and then suddenly I became aware of a loud buzzing sound from over near the window.
I thought it would be a fly because I am Australian. I looked behind the curtain.
There was a GIANT BEE like an INCH LONG AT LEAST.
... I found my room key and rushed to the motel office.
"Oh, that'll be a yellowjacket. We get those at this time of year."
The very nice lady from the desk got a cup and a lid and came back to my room with me. She oh-so-calmly trapped the yellowjacket in the cup, put the lid on, and took it outside to release it. I thanked her profusely.
Apparently courage in the face of small creatures is somewhat regional. I am *completely chill* when it comes to dealing with spiders.
However, faced with a bee bigger than my rented SUV, I go running for a local, because EEEEEEEEEEEE.
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Photos I took this morning:
1) The mist rolling across the surface of the river/lake/thing behind this motel.
1a) The same with a polarising filter, because sun on water = glare.
2) My name, written with my finger in the frost that had formed on the bonnet of my car.
(Sorry, the hood of my SUV, I'm in America. Even though by American standards it's a tiny baby SUV, but still.)
By the standards of my home, it is midwinter, deepest freezing cold here, but it's clear blue skies and sunshine and it's just beautiful.
Photos I wish I'd taken yesterday include:
Washington State's approach to anti-littering signs. I've seen all of two, but they're just so... direct, in a way I've never seen from any other region.
It just says:
LITTER AND IT WILL HURTCurrent Location: Ellensburg, WA
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... when you realise there is a bug crawling across the sheet in your motel bed.
In this instance, a little beetle-like thing that probably came in with me, BUT STILL.
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This was today's driving path, approximately:
Then I hit some sort of limit, cried for about two hours, and am now chilling in a motel room.
Sooo going to post less than I'd planned to, for now, about driving through Columbia Gorge.
Short version: Columbia Gorge takes the concept of "scenic beauty" and elevates it to almost sarcastic levels.Current Location: Ellensburg, WA Current Mood:  depressed
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I am losing my will to believe that it rains in America.
Anyway, today I slept in and then napped, and seem thereby to have at least partially dispelled the brain malaise that had been lingering since Vegas. (Too much cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes for my brain, apparently.)
After that we went and collected the hire car that will be driving me for the next week, and velithya as well for the week after that, around northwestern USA and a small part of Canada. We got a pretty-much-free upgrade to an SUV, which will be handy if the roads are a bit frosty or something.
We went to Best Buy, where I acquired a Samsung Galaxy, then we went to a little vintage-y shop and velithya bought a couple of sewing patterns and I bought a 1941 issue of Life magazine, then we came back to olivermoss's house and had an Authentic Cultural Experience, e.g. we did some pumpkin carving.
It is fun, although cleaning out the pumpkins is also gross.
Tomorrow, velithya is abandoning me to go to Pittsburgh, and I am heading out to explore and maybe visit some national parks, since they're opening again.
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