Since the previous post doesn’t exactly count, I didn’t write anything this week. And that won’t change, since this won’t exactly count either. Next week I’ll be forced to write about more serious matters, but this will have to do until then because my mind’s really not into it at the moment. Not that it ever is, but if I don’t really have to write a serious post I’d rather not struggle to just create one and have it invariably turn out bad.
I’m trying to play Two Worlds more than usual and actually get somewhere. Not that I couldn’t finish it rather quickly if I wanted to, but I don’t want to finish it right away, I want to explore the whole game world before I do. I’ve been playing it for two and a half months and I still have a long way to go at this rate, especially considering that it says I’ve only been playing for 94 hours. That barely averages 1.25 hours per day, not counting time lost when I had to reload, which is awfully little. Six hours per day used to come relatively easy to me when I was interested in a game, and if I really meant to push I could make it to ten on some days without much of a problem, so something weird is going on, because it’s really not a bad game… Sure, it’s not one of those games that got me really excited, but it’s good enough overall, so it shouldn’t be a problem, yet it is.
Otherwise, my muscles are still trying to make sure I remember that I cleaned my room far more thoroughly than usual on Wednesday… Pain is never nice, but at least I don’t mind this one. I do mind the one caused by that tooth which I supposedly fixed recently, however. Granted that it no longer hurts when touched with something cold, but now I’m starting to feel a dull pain coming from it out of the blue now and then. I do hope the dentist did her job properly and that this will go away shortly instead of getting worse…
Finally, I still didn’t start reading A Feast for Crows. Doubt I’ll do it next week either, but probably the week after that. It could depend on how much I’ll be playing Two Worlds perhaps, since I don’t think anything else is going to take up a significant amount of time this month, unlike last month when I was just starting A Storm of Swords 2 when dad asked for those news I’m helping him with. He said he decided to take a break from writing for that magazine because they haven’t been paying him for some time, so he won’t be asking me for those this month either.
I’m trying to have this posted Saturday for once because my ISP seems to be having issues lately. Especially at night, so it could actually be scheduled downtime that they don’t bother telling us about, but I don’t know that and am not particularly keen on testing their response time for a problem that would arise on a Sunday…
At least my mind seems to have a nice series of scenarios to go through when I wake up and before I go to bed…
Was thinking about something once again last night, and once again decided against it. Maybe I avoided another regret, maybe I’m heading straight towards it, I don’t know. Quite confused here, but I doubt it’s relevant right now, so delaying further isn’t likely to be an issue.
Right now, nothing changed. And if something will change at some point, I doubt this will make much of a difference anyway. I guess I’m worrying too much over too little, but that’d be nothing new.
Yes, I know this makes no sense. No, this time I won’t say what I’m talking about. Move along now…
Since a Pirate Party is being born in Romania as well and I’m trying to work up to posting my ideas about a future copyright law in detail, I might as well start by briefly explaining another idea that has been running through my mind for some time, which has to do with something that I tend to call the Content Creators’ Association. I wrote a little about it in an e-mail I sent some time ago, but not much else…
I know that creating and maintaining such an organization would be a truly massive undertaking and it would require a lot of cooperation between content creators all over the world. It’d also require quite a bit of courage on their part, especially from those who currently have lucrative contracts with distributors, because they’d truly reap the benefits of their work from that point forward, which means that nobody else would take the money that their work has earned, but also that nobody else would provide a safety net in case their work fails to generate the expected income. This sounds far better for those who aren’t yet famous, those who create just because they want to or those who are just trying to climb through the ranks, than for the big names, but I certainly have no problem with that. Actually, that’s exactly how it should be and you can even say it’s designed to level the playing field a little.
I started by saying those things because anyone reading this is likely to wonder if I’m aware of how difficult and unlikely it is for something like this to happen. Some people could be inclined to stop reading before reaching the end, so it can be better to have such explanations out of the way early on. But now they are out of the way and I can actually get to explaining exactly what I mean.
The Content Creators’ Association should be an international organization created in order to act as the intermediary between the content creators and those who enjoy their work, therefore eliminating distributors, or at least relegating them to a niche. The main function would be to make it easy for people to send some money to the software developers, writers, musicians, painters or other artists whose works they obtain for free through file-sharing, especially once this will be completely legal. It would also make it much easier for content developers to work together, improving the quality of their work, and to promote each other, ensuring that their work reaches more people. It would emphasize quality over marketing and would also ensure that the money end up where they should be, namely in the content creators’ accounts and not in those of their distributors.
It’s important not to allow the Content Creators’ Association to become yet another distributor, which is what would likely happen if it would have its own management and be an independent entity. In order to avoid that, it should be managed by the content creators themselves, with people hired only for the less important positions which they themselves wouldn’t be able to fill. It would also have to be a strictly non-profit entity. This would ensure that the content creators would fully benefit from their work and that no other interests would take precedence.
In order to make it easy for everyone to send money to the content creators of their choice, this organization would work a little like a bank. People would be able to create accounts and put money in them through any means, such as credit or debit cards, bank transfers, SMS, prepaid cards or making cash deposits in certain locations. It’s very important to have all these different methods available because everyone should be able to easily charge their account. Then, each account owner would decide who they want to send their money to, and they’d obviously decide how much to send to each content creator as well. As I said, this applies to the content which is obtained for free through file-sharing and is a means of allowing content creators to make money while also eliminating distributors and distribution costs. The organization could also be used to sell hard copies, making those accessible to people regardless of their geographical location as well, but this system obviously couldn’t apply to those as well.
Because content creators would be spread all over the world, it’d be very easy for this organization to have representatives everywhere. Its representatives would be the content creators themselves! There could be a little booth where people could make cash deposits, buy prepaid cards or pick up the products they have ordered on-line set up in the headquarters of every software company, every concert venue, every movie set or theater… The content creators would no longer depend on anyone else and the consumers would no longer be restricted to what their local distributors offer. Not to mention the opportunity for free self-promotion whenever a customer would automatically notice the work of a certain content creator whenever they’d come to charge their account or pick up a hard copy of a product, even if they had previously been completely unaware of their existence and only picked the location because it was nearby.
But, even with distributors out of the way, there would still be costs to cover. These could be much lower than expected if the content creators would do as much of the additional work, such as manning those booths, maintaining the servers and providing assistance, themselves, but they would still exist. The fact that the organization would work a little like a bank could help somewhat, as some profit could be made by investing the money people have put in their accounts but didn’t yet send to content creators, but that couldn’t possibly cover it all. Still, it shouldn’t be a problem to express the operating expenses as a percentage of the total income and take that percentage out of the money meant for each content creator, therefore ensuring fairness.
That way, the content creators would receive as much as possible for their work, with those who benefit the most from this system also supporting most of its operating expenses, and the consumers would know that as much as possible of their money would actually reach those who create the content they enjoy. Restrictions and conflicting interests would be reduced as much as possible and the direct connection thus created between the content creators and their audience would also be a great help, certainly. Everyone wins except the distributors, which is exactly the point.
Silly me. Apparently they put it there from the beginning and I didn’t know Home was on YouTube until today.
I’d strongly encourage everyone to see it, because it’s truly impressive. Of course, it’ll only have the desired effect on those who are already aware of the problems and trying to do something to solve them, because any such campaign bounces right off the rest. It does focus on humans and on how what we’re doing to the Earth comes back and bites us in the ass, not so much on the environment itself (which is why I’m filing this post in “Society” and not “Environment“), which is not the approach I like to see, but it could be helpful in getting the point across. Still, it hardly has any real shock value, so I doubt it’ll make much of a difference, but such campaigns usually don’t so that’s nothing new and, again, the film itself is impressive.
There’s little else to say about most of the film. It shows the wounds that our cities, plantations and exploitations create upon the Earth and how many people suffer because of it. It shows the shortsightedness of our development plans and of “civilization” as a whole. It shows the contrast between the majesty of Nature and our inefficient, stupid and harmful methods. It left me speechless, made me have goose bumps and occasionally caused a few tears to appear in my eyes. If I could cry while alone, I would have cried…
The final part bothered me though. Considering how things are going, it seems too late to be anything else… Not to mention that some of the methods presented there as solutions aren’t solutions at all and the others are far from enough. That optimistic note at the end seems to dilute the message and worries me a little. But it doesn’t make the rest of the film any less impressive or any less worth watching.
Who knows, maybe it could even have a little impact, as highly unlikely as that is.
The title says BDSM, but this post will mainly focus on the domination aspect of it, and I’m just talking about the relationship between a dominant and a submissive, won’t even go into master and slave relationships. I should also point out from the beginning that what I’m trying to say is not that this lifestyle breeds domestic violence, but quite the opposite, that people who exhibit dominant traits and don’t admit to them, or at least not enough to say that they desire such a lifestyle, may tend to become violent when they realize that their partners aren’t submissive enough.
BDSM requires consent. The behavior exhibited in such a relationship is desired and enjoyed by both (or all) partners. If a person is tied down, dominated, humiliated or even injured, it’s their choice. Sure, the act itself is likely the wish of their dominant partner, but the terms of the relationship have been established from the beginning, there are boundaries which are respected and safewords that can be used if the submissive partner is no longer comfortable with what’s going on. Therefore, regardless of how it may seem for an outside observer, there can be no harm done in a proper BDSM relationship.
The problem appears when there’s no such understanding, when the behavior is not desired by all those involved, when the boundaries are not respected and when the domination, humiliation or violence doesn’t stop even after the one subjected to it makes it clear that they’re not comfortable in that position. These are destructive relationships, where one partner forces their will upon the other, and unfortunately they’re quite common.
Let’s take a moment to think about those who exercise destructive dominance in their relationships. Why does that happen? How often is it because they actually want to harm their partner and how often is it simply because they want their partner to do what they say? Maybe I’m wrong, but I think relatively few people truly make a goal out of causing harm to their partners, if only because it’d make little sense to still desire to have a relationship with them if that were the case. And, if so, we can conclude that an important cause of domestic violence are dominant tendencies and desires which aren’t recognized or at least assumed as such.
Based on the large number of domestic violence cases, we can conclude that there are a lot of dominant individuals, so there wouldn’t be enough submissive ones to create suitable matches, but that’s an issue for later. The main problem now is that many of those who exhibit these dominant tendencies either don’t notice them at all or don’t think their partner should be made aware of them. When trying to explain why that happens, I find that culture most likely plays a very important role, especially in the case of men, who are most often the authors of domestic violence anyway. If a man lives in a place where culture and tradition say that he should be the ruler of his household, he’s more likely to assume that this dominant behavior would be expected of him, just like he starts to expect a submissive behavior from his future spouse, and when he finds reality to be different his response often ends up being a violent one. And culture and tradition unfortunately still say that men should be rulers of the household pretty much everywhere.
Culture may be very difficult to change, and tradition perhaps even more so, but there are still things we can do. Popularizing the concept of BDSM and trying to make people understand exactly what it involves could help some of them recognize these behavior patterns in themselves and others. Some could even realize that such a relationship is what they desire and start looking for an appropriate partner, while others may have a better chance of knowing what they need to stay away from. Campaigns against domestic violence focus on the acts themselves, usually after they become bad enough, while the indirect effect that something like this could have would have a greater scope.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the same mindset and behavior patterns drive those who take a dominant role in BDSM relationships and domestic abusers. The two are completely different and a domestic abuser will certainly never make a decent dominant partner, that’s quite obvious. However, some of those who have dominant tendencies could train themselves to become decent dominant partners in such relationships if they’d really want to and if they’d start early enough, before those tendencies would have a chance to take them down the other path, before they’d lead to abuse and violence. This won’t solve the problem as a whole, but it could at least help a little. And the fact that some people make a living by dominating others like this shows that there’s still demand for a few more good dominant partners or even masters.
Don’t ask me how could one train themselves for this, I have never been in such a relationship and have no desire to ever be in one either, despite the fact that I could somewhat describe myself as borderline submissive. But I’m sure there are good sources of information available and also people who have experience in such matters and who’d be willing to help those who are genuinely interested. After all, those who currently are good at taking a dominant role in such relationships weren’t born knowing all they needed to know either! They simply realized that they had these tendencies and they developed them in a way which ended up being satisfactory for both themselves and their partners. They realized that they don’t have a right to demand submission from any partner they might have, so they trained themselves and looked for a suitable partner in order to create something positive instead of something harmful and damaging.
It’s a complex matter and, as always, I’m bad at explaining things, but this could be a start… There will still be many people who believe that their partners must obey them simply because of their gender or social status, unfortunately. There will also be people who are just evil enough to desire to harm their partners. But this is a potential solution for those who are in neither of those categories, those who find themselves desiring something and not knowing how to obtain it without causing harm to others. It’s an issue that most people still know far too little about, so informing them could really help.
