I'm back!

Internets are operating at maximum capacity.
Idle time wasting in progress.
Obtaining musics and entertainments at high speeds.
Subject now possesses 100% of happiness capacity.

-Brandon

Sadness...

Well my computer is completely fucked, and has been for about a week and a half now. So if I'm sent messages and I don't respond, I'm not slighting you, I just don't have anyway to read it at the moment.

-Brandon

For the few of you who don't know...

I have a myspace page now. Why? because I'm weak. http://www.myspace.com/tsgarp524. This is still my primart blog, but I tend to copy paste stuff to myspace as well.

-Brandon

Woo!

I have a second job! I start on monday! I'm now on my way to being slightly less poor! Woo!

-Brandon

Fuck Iowa/Iowa State Weekend

This is, hands down, the worst fucking weekend in Iowa City. Every jackass in iowa flocks to this town, and every jackass already here is working three times as hard to piss me off. I wish both teams had somehow lost so the none of the assholes would be happy.

-Brandon

The story

So, I got home from work today at 5ish, ate some food, watched some west wing, and then spent some time fucking around online. Something (I don't know what) started a train of thought that led to a cool idea for a short story. I have wanted for a while to attempt to write a comic, I just don't have the artistic skill to actually draw it. So I begin writing my ideas for the story. My story turned into 14 pages of scrawled notes about a fictional country including its government, demographics, architectural influences, geography, economics and social problems. My original story idea has turned into an introduction to a fake country that will leave me with the ablity to write all sorts of stories during all sorts of time periods. I'm gonna have some friends who know more about certain subjects look over some of this stuff and give their input over how intelligent they think it is, but if I can script out some actual dialogue and get a decent artist interested, I think this can go somewhere. Even if I don't do anything with it, its nice to be doing something productive, I haven't really worked toward creating anything since I've dropped out of school, this project is emotionally energizing.

-Brandon

Change of plans

I've abandoned my aforementioned large post. The outline is saved and may be continued at a later time. I have a cool idea for a fiction short story that I'm messing around with. I might be talking about this to a friend who can draw (to turn this into a comic) at a later time. For now I need to figure out the storyline specifics.

I'm kind of excited about this.

-Brandon

Ugh

Well, The big post isn't really coming along all that well. I know what I want to say, and have it in a sort of outline format ready to go, but transfering it to readable text is less easy. It doesn't help that I've been consistantly sleep deprived the last 4 days. Not enough sleep, but not able to fall asleep at a decent time when I have to work in the morning. I have trouble falling asleep, I have had this problem on and off for the last 4 years. Dropping out of school helped quite a bit, but when stress pops up in other aspects of my life it becomes a problem again (which doesn't help my stress any). Monday and Tuesday are off for me, I'll catch up on my rest and try to pick it up again.

-Brandon

Tie you over.

I'm working on a fairly large post that I intend to also be fairly well polished. In the meantime here is a sweet H.L. Mencken (who had some pretty smart things to say, mixed in with some pretty ignorant things as well) quote who I have been reading a bit of lately and who is, kind of, the reason for the larger post I'm working on.

Lying stands on a different plane from all other moral offenses, not because it is intrinsically more heinous or less heinous, but simply because it is the only one that may be accurately measured. Forgetting unwitting error, which has nothing to do with morals, a statement is either true or not true. This is a simple distinction and relatively easy to establish. But when one comes to other derelictions the thing grows more complicated. The line between stealing and not stealing is beautifully vague; whether or not one has crossed it is not determined by the objective act, but by such delicate things as motive and purpose. So again, with assault, sex offenses, and even murder; there may be surrounding circumstances which greatly condition the moral quality of the actual act. But lying is specific, exact, scientific. Its capacity for precise determination, indeed, makes its presence or non-presence the only accurate gauge of other immoral acts. Murder, for example, is nowhere regarded as immoral save it involve some repudiation of a social compact, of a tacit promise to refrain from it—in brief, some deceit, some perfidy, some lie. One may kill freely when the pact is formally broken, as in war. One may kill equally freely when it is broken by the victim, as in an assault by a highwayman. But one[Pg 31] may not kill so long as it is not broken, and one may not break it to clear the way. Some form of lie is at the bottom of all other recognized crimes, from seduction to embezzlement. Curiously enough, this master immorality of them all is not prohibited by the Ten Commandments, nor is it penalized, in its pure form, by the code of any civilized nation. Only savages have laws against lying per se.

-H.L. Mencken
A book of Calumny

-Brandon

Awful article at Forbes

I found this on BoingBoing (who are busy making remixes of this article). It's about why men shouldn't marry career women. Apparently a women's right to work is bad because it makes it harder for the lazy husband to be happier. Damn women's lib for making it harder to keep Michael Noer's wife in the kitchen.

The article is posted below. Not Forbes has tried to cover its ass by turning the single editorial into a "point/counter-point" page by taking on an alternate opinion. "We're not sexist we actually just wanted a debate, even though we didn't bother with another opinion until after we got fuckloads of complaints." Which is revisionism, which pisses me off. In today's internet age everyone had the ability to write whatever they wish online and access far more information then they ever could have decades ago. Professional publications like Forbes can post their own articles and editorials online for larger audiences to read. It's great. The internet also allows a larger degree of user control. Ability to do things, like, alter an article after it has already been 'published' or merely alter how it was presented in such a way as to change the original intention of the magazine. This ability to revise confuses those on the lookout for information because now the information flow has become inconsistent. This backhanded deceit makes it harder to trust your sources of information. Suddenly the reader is no longer sure if the articles are legitimate editorials or politically correct bullshit posted to mollify the masses. An editorial is meant to spark debate. Changing it in order to limit that debate is asinine even if the previous editorial was moronic. Forbes had every right to post the anti-career women article but they need to realize that the masses have every right to respond as well. Attempting to change the way the article is presented in order to calm the masses is cowardly.

http://www.forbes.com/home/2006/08/23/Marriage-Careers-Divorce_cx_mn_land.html

Point: Don't Marry Career Women
By Michael Noer
How do women, careers and marriage mix? Not well, say social scientists.

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women--even those with a "feminist" outlook--are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Not a happy conclusion, especially given that many men, particularly successful men, are attracted to women with similar goals and aspirations. And why not? After all, your typical career girl is well-educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? SureÂ…at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you. Sound familiar?

Many factors contribute to a stable marriage, including the marital status of your spouse's parents (folks with divorced parents are significantly more likely to get divorced themselves), age at first marriage, race, religious beliefs and socio-economic status. And, of course, many working women are indeed happily and fruitfully married--it's just that they are less likely to be so than non-working women. And that, statistically speaking, is the rub.

To be clear, we're not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.

If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).

Why? Well, despite the fact that the link between work, women and divorce rates is complex and controversial, much of the reasoning is based on a lot of economic theory and a bit of common sense. In classic economics, a marriage is, at least in part, an exercise in labor specialization. Traditionally men have tended to do "market" or paid work outside the home and women have tended to do "non-market" or household work, including raising children. All of the work must get done by somebody, and this pairing, regardless of who is in the home and who is outside the home, accomplishes that goal. Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker argued that when the labor specialization in a marriage decreases--if, for example, both spouses have careers--the overall value of the marriage is lower for both partners because less of the total needed work is getting done, making life harder for both partners and divorce more likely. And, indeed, empirical studies have concluded just that.

In 2004, John H. Johnson examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and concluded that gender has a significant influence on the relationship between work hours and increases in the probability of divorce. Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect. "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson says. A few other studies, which have focused on employment (as opposed to working hours) have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of "low marital quality."

The other reason a career can hurt a marriage will be obvious to anyone who has seen their mate run off with a co-worker: When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you. "The work environment provides a host of potential partners," researcher Adrian J. Blow reported in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, "and individuals frequently find themselves spending a great deal of time with these individuals."

There's more: According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.

And if the cheating leads to divorce, you're really in trouble. Divorce has been positively correlated with higher rates of alcoholism, clinical depression and suicide. Other studies have associated divorce with increased rates of cancer, stroke, and sexually-transmitted disease. Plus divorce is financially devastating. According to one recent study on "Marriage and Divorce's Impact on Wealth," published in The Journal of Sociology, divorced people see their overall net worth drop an average of 77%.

So why not just stay single? Because, academically speaking, a solid marriage has a host of benefits beyond just individual "happiness." There are broader social and health implications as well. According to a 2004 paper entitled "What Do Social Scientists Know About the Benefits of Marriage?" marriage is positively associated with "better outcomes for children under most circumstances," higher earnings for adult men, and "being married and being in a satisfying marriage are positively associated with health and negatively associated with mortality." In other words, a good marriage is associated with a higher income, a longer, healthier life and better-adjusted kids.

A word of caution, though: As with any social scientific study, it's important not to confuse correlation with causation. In other words, just because married folks are healthier than single people, it doesn't mean that marriage is causing the health gains. It could just be that healthier people are more likely to be married.

-Brandon