Kill La Kill

Here's a weird thought: I love the anime Kill La Kill, but I'd hesitate to recommend it. That's odd, isn't it? Why wouldn't I recommend a show I enjoy?

Kill La Kill has fantastic fight and action sequences. Everything about the show is over-the-top, so the fights are just crazy awesome. The fights are easily some of the best I've seen anywhere, on a level with Gurren Lagann (of course, because it's the same creators). One of my favourite little details is how the show does debris in explosions - instead of rocks and dust, it's often dozens of people thrown screaming into the air. It's just a background detail, but it's hilarious. 

It's also got some surprising depth to it with commentary on fascism, our relationship with clothing, self-confidence, and rejecting society's hangups. There's a lot of subtext if you're paying attention. It's notable that the first scene opens with a history lesson on Hitler's rise to power.

The big reason I hesitate to recommend Kill La Kill is because of how fine a line the show walks . 

The show frequently and extensively sexualizes its high school girls. From what I understand that kind of stuff isn't taken as seriously in Japan, but here in Canada, the amount of skin and butt shots and voyeur gags make me want to avoid having the anime on around other people. The main character's outfit is very revealing, and action scenes work in gratuitous butt shots or excuses to show more skin. Male characters frequently gawk openly and it's treated as an "oh, you" thing, as if the writers are shrugging their shoulders and saying "boys will be boys".

On the other hand, the four most important characters in the show are all women, and of those, the three fighters are the most powerful people on the planet (and the other most powerful is also a woman). They have unique personalities and complex relationships with each other and with the supporting cast. They deal with challenges to their viewpoints and relationships that force them to confront themselves. The hero and the antagonist actively reject society's conventions on how women should dress and are stronger for it. The show mostly doesn't even acknowledge romance as a thing - everyone's too busy dealing with more pressing issues - which strikes me as very unusual for a series about high school girls.

(as an aside, male characters spend more time naked than female characters, but it's usually played for laughs rather than titillation)

Whether Kill La Kill is empowering or demeaning or awesome or embarrassing is going to come down to individual taste. I'm usually very good at judging whether someone I know will like a given piece of media, but I'm really not certain about this one because of how it takes both sides of its issues to the extreme.

So rather than recommend it to anyone I know, I'll just leave this here and you can decide for yourself if you want to give it a shot.

Why and how I'm losing weight

I've been working on losing weight over the last few months and I've been making some progress. Some people have asked me why I'm losing weight, or told me that they didn't think I needed to, so I thought I'd write about it here. It's also an excuse to post something because I haven't updated this blog in months.

I've never thought of myself as fat. I don't recall anyone calling me fat or making fun of my weight. If you passed me on the street, "fat" would not be a word you'd use to describe me.

But I have been carrying a little extra weight for a long time. After a certain age, if you look at photos of me with my three brothers, you can tell that I'm proportionally the heaviest. I've never been ashamed of my weight or embarrassed to be seen without a shirt, but when I look in the mirror I think I wouldn't mind losing a few pounds. No one's ever called me fat, but a couple of people whose opinions I care about and who meant well have told me that I'd be more attractive if I lost a little bit of weight. 155 pounds at five-foot-six isn't considered unhealthy, but it's a little high for someone who doesn't work on their muscle.

In other words, it's never been a health concern and has never bothered me enough to make a significant lifestyle change. Every once in a while I decide to start going to the gym in the off season when I'm not working, but boating season starts again and work eats twelve hours a day five days a week, it's hard to put any meaningful amount of time into exercise and still have hobbies and see friends. Or maybe those are excuses and I just don't like it. Over the years I've made some changes to what I eat, and those I've kept up with - I've been eating fewer processed foods and smaller amounts of sugar. But those relatively minor changes weren't having an effect.

A few months ago I read that cutting fat is 100% down to "calories in, calories out". To put it simply, if you want to lose weight, it doesn't matter how much you exercise if you're eating too much. Of course it's much more complex than that if you have specific health goals or want to build muscle mass, but if you already eat relatively healthily and just want to lose a few pounds, that's all there is to it.

At the same time the MyFitnessPal app was recommended to me. You punch in your current weight, your target weight, and when you want to get to your target, and it'll tell you how many calories you should eat each day. It also has a huge database of foods and nutrition information to make it easy to see what's in the food you eat. If you want to be really accurate you'll need a food scale, but you can get those for $20 or less.

This app is pretty much 100% responsible for my weight loss. Once I started accurately tracking my meals and snacks, I realized that what I was eating wasn't the problem - the issue was how much I was eating. All I had to do was pay attention to portion sizes and stop eating when I hit my daily limit. There's a bar code scanner, so most of the time I don't even have to search for what I'm looking for - just scan the code, punch in the weight, and that's it. And for pre-portioned foods (like a single-serving yogurt cup) I don't even have to input the weight. If I knew it could be this easy I would have done it years ago.

The best part is that I'm not dealing with any big restrictions. I can still split a pizza or go for drinks after work every once in a while as long as I make sure to stick to my limits most of the time (though it's even better if I plan ahead and work that stuff in). On the other hand, the biggest challenge was that I was really hungry for the first few days of eating less, but I got used to it. If I get hungry when it's not food time or I've already hit my limit, I drink some water.

In the last month a lot of people have told me I'm looking good and asked me if I've lost weight. I have - about ten pounds so far. But despite the compliments and the numbers I wasn't feeling like I was making any significant progress, probably because I've been seeing less progress in the mirror day-to-day than people who have gone a month without seeing me. 

Today, though, I put on my belt and it felt too big. I had to tighten it a notch. Maybe I'm not seeing the progress with my eyes, but I felt it this morning.

Social justice and why I avoid it

(been a while since my last post here... but I did say updates would be occasional)

For the most part, I tend to stay out of discussions on feminism or men's rights. I've seen enough crap on the internet that I don't particularly feel like associating myself with either, no matter how valid their points might be. But having done some thinking over the last few days, I figured I'd write down some thoughts.

I fully expect at least some of this to be controversial, but hopefully I can explain all this well enough that it makes sense. You don't have to agree with me, but these are my personal thoughts and interpretations on what I've observed.

First up: men's rights. From what I understand, the MRA movement was founded as a reaction to modern feminism, based on the belief that feminism has either ignored men or begun to actively push against them. Some MRAs I've read seem like very reasonable people trying to point out legitimate men's issues that feminism actually doesn't seem to have addressed, such as the vastly higher rates of homelessness, workplace injury and death, and suicide in men compared to women. 

But large numbers of people calling themselves "men's rights advocates" aren't advocating men's rights so much as hating on feminism and women. The best men's rights communities I've come across online are still at least 50% outrage topics of "look at how horrible and/or negligent feminism is because this one person or group's actions are obviously representative of the entire movement". And those are among the better communities I've seen. The worst attack and threaten any woman who invades what they consider "men's spaces", or rationalize/justify abuse and violence because the woman obviously deserved it, or suggest a return to "when men were real men and women were real women" (or in other words, "go back to the kitchen and make me a sandwich while the men deal with serious business").

While I'm on this topic I'll take a small detour. I often see The Red Pill and men's rights confused or equated. Men's rights is (ostensibly) about men's rights, while The Red Pill is a seduction community based on the belief that they know what women want better than women do, and that what women want happens to be a dominant alpha male (aka an egotistical jerk who cares only about what he wants, and takes it when he wants it). Which is actually a lot more horrible than the idea that men have issues that aren't being addressed - when you take it to its logical conclusion, The Red Pill philosophy is straight up advocating abuse and rape because "that's what women want".

So I avoid men's rights because while there are some legitimate points in there that deserve attention, an awful lot of the members are dubious to terrible in their views on women and feminism. Plus it tends to get confused or lumped in with The Red Pill (which I still can't believe actually exists) so that's definitely something to avoid.

Which brings me to my views on feminism, and where I expect to see more disapproval. It's cool to hate on MRAs, but criticism of feminism is not well looked upon. Anyway. It should be obvious to any rational person that feminism is full of legitimate concerns and issues. It's not an opinion that women have less representation and less diversity than men in just about every form of media ever - it's a simple fact that anyone can verify by watching movies and TV, reading books, or playing video games. It's a fact that women hold vastly fewer positions of power - you can verify this by looking at the makeup of governments or corporate boards.

But it's not quite as simple as "men are privileged and women are oppressed", which is an idea that I'm seeing pushed more and more. I'm a firm believer that almost nothing is as simple or black-and-white as the narrative often wants you to accept. I'm not going to argue that feminism is a negative force, but when Emma Watson's speech at the UN is hailed as a shining beacon of what feminism should be, that gives me pause. She makes this brilliant speech about how we're all in this together, and that men have issues that need to be addressed too, even making it personal with the struggles she's seen her father go through. But then she ends the speech by asking men to pledge to help women in their struggle against oppression. What happened to and "we're all in this together"? Feminism is for everyone and men have problems too, but men should help women and forget about vice versa? And this speech was almost unanimously praised, which, again, is a little troubling to me given its conclusion.

And, like men's rights, feminism has its less reasonable, more radical groups as well. Feminism as a whole is much bigger and more legitimate than men's rights, but as a bigger movement it also has a bigger radical division. I could quote specifics, but I don't think that's productive, so I'll just move on to my next point.

You might have noticed that I mentioned that critique of feminism isn't well received. I often get the feeling that feminism has developed a sort of reactionary shield where, in the interest of creating safe non-threatening spaces, any disagreement or criticism is either accused of misogyny or outright banned. This feeling in particular is why I tend to avoid discussion on feminism or feminist topics - the common accusation that disagreement equates to sexism or hate, that atmosphere of "if you're not with us you're against us". I find this incredibly counterproductive. Accepting legitimate criticism is a hugely important way to learn from your mistakes and improve. Of course, the counterpoint is that feminists receive a lot of backlash and hate, so it's not always easy to filter legitimate criticism from aggression without wading through both. But then again, my concerns about Watson's UN speech went ignored when I tried to discuss.

And here we come to the No True Scotsman fallacy. Whenever you see someone write or say something particularly vile under a feminist or MRA flag, or enough backlash against a particular statement, you'll see others coming out of the woodwork to reject it and say "well, that person isn't a true feminist/MRA". The problem comes in how you define a true feminist/MRA. Both movements have so many factions and splinters and alternative philosophies that you can't really say which one is the "true" one.

When someone who calls themselves a men's rights advocate says "she was asking for it" or someone who calls themselves a feminist says "cishet white men should be killed", or when a member of the movement criticizes the movement, it's easy to say that he's not a true MRA, she's not a true feminist. But they're making their claims under the banner. Who decides what true men's rights activism is, or what true feminism is? What gives you the right to conclude that someone calling themselves a feminist isn't a true feminist just because you don't agree with their brand of feminism?

Perhaps just as importantly, how representative of the core are the extremes? People seem quite happy to judge groups by their extremes, which is another thing I'm really not comfortable with. A thirteen-year-old girl on tumblr who desperately wants to be included in justifiable outrage is not representative of feminism as a whole, and equally, an unemployed thirty-five-year-old man who blames feminism for his lack of work and girlfriend is not representative of men's rights as a whole. And yet it seems that both groups are pretty okay with making those accusations. 

And finally there's the idea that feminism and men's rights are in opposition. Both claim to fight for equality between men and women, and yet each accuses the other of sexism and hatred. Now, I'll grant that MRA groups seem to be proportionally much more confrontational and oppositional than feminists, but I still see plenty of feminists using "MRA" as basically a curse word to represent anyone who rejects feminism.

I usually try not to get involved in any of this because people tend to lump the extremes in with the whole and take disagreement or critique as sexism or attack. I'm not thrilled with the frequency with which I'm labelled into one camp or the other when I talk about gendered issues. I don't like the imposed labels, the idea that if you support women's rights you are a feminist, or if you support men's rights you are an MRA (or, for that matter, the idea that if you support men's rights you're also a feminist). I'm not a fan of the baggage that's been attached to both terms so I don't appreciate having either title imposed on me.

So I try to stay out of it. Which is getting harder and harder as awareness spreads. And I feel it says something about the state of criticism that even though I know my friends are reasonable, intelligent people, some part of me still worries that I might make some enemies by posting this.

Sometimes I feel like the Neutrals from Futurama.

New D&D blog post: magic and tech

Some people say that fantasy worlds with magic wouldn't develop technology.

I say that's dumb.

Ex Machina and a personal revelation about worldbuilding

I watched Ex Machina tonight. It was extremely well put together and had great characters and moments, but I didn't really like it. I couldn't put my finger on why until I had a sort of mini-epiphany and learned something about myself. (I've had a few of these in the last couple of years, maybe I'll write more about them).

Spoiler alert, this post isn't actually really about Ex Machina, so don't expect a review.

I've been aware for quite some time that I prefer fiction with an element of the fantastic - something you don't see in the real world. Most often that means science fiction, but also some absurdist comedy (like Airplane, Police Squad, or Hot Fuzz). I was never really drawn to fantasy, though. There are a couple of exceptions - I can't not like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - but as a general rule, not too into fantasy.

A lot of fantasy strikes me as generic. The same magic, the same medieval Europe style, the same creatures, the same elves and dwarves and orcs. It's the main reason I didn't like Dragon Age: Origins - a third of it felt generic, and half felt like it was trying to put its own spin on standard fantasy but not going far enough.

Stay with me, I promise this is going somewhere.

Despite having little interest in fantasy, I love D&D. Not the pre-built adventures and worlds, though - I make my own. I love coming up with or mashing together ideas, building a world, and exploring the implications and consequences of the setting.

So now we're getting around to it. Ex Machina has an excellent story and characters, but it has no worldbuilding. We get in-depth character studies, revealing personalities and motivations and emotions, but it's all set in the real world, and we don't get to see the implications or consequences of the events and decisions. And I think that's what bugs me. I love clever, original worlds, and I love examining the philosophies and differences and choices that emerge from these unique places and situations. That's why, the only times I have used pre-existing D&D settings, I tinker with them and change things to put a new spin on the world and see what happens.

Long and meandering story short, that's why I didn't love Ex Machina.

Lockstep

Apparently I'm on a sci-fi book binge all of a sudden. I blame birthday gifts.

Second book is Karl Schroeder's Lockstep. I love the worlbuilding, but the actual story has a lot of bits that come off as "generic young adult dystopia".

The core world idea is that there are about 70,000 starless planets between Earth and Alpha Centauri that run on a lockstep cycle. The entire population hibernates for (on some planets) thirty years, then wakes up for a month to do normal life things, then hibernates again. This allows decades for robots to harvest, manufacture, and from the humans' perspective, you go to sleep for a night and suddenly you have thirty years worth of resources to trade or spend. 

There's also the idea of stowaways or pirates or just regular people who are exploiting or not participating in the lockstep cycle - they either don't hibernate, or deliberately offset their pace. To people who don't hibernate, they're living normal lives, while locksteppers seem to age at a thirtieth (or less) of the normal rate.

That's all awesome. Fantastic ideas. Something I've never seen before, but is also a great, logical way for a huge non-lightspeed space empire to function.

The problem is when the book gets bogged down in stock-standard YA dystopia tropes, the big one being the cartoonishly evil corporate monopoly empire opposed by the pure-hearted poor folks.

But that's just a trick! The book only makes me think it's generic YA dystopia early on because the main character, Toby, has been thrown into a world he doesn't understand and everyone's trying to find a way to explain fourteen thousand years of civilization in a way that won't blow up his brain. So the story turns out to be much more interesting than I initially expected in my moments of eye-rolling.

That said, the romance subplot does feel a little shoehorned. But more importantly, I'm a little disappointed that the lockstep concept wasn't as fully explored as I would have liked. There are some ideas that are touched on but not expanded, such as the idea of differently-paced locksteps raiding each other, non-locksteps raiding locksteps, and entire civilizations growing and dying in the span of what feels like a few years to the locksteppers.

So now I'm totally thinking I'll steal the lockstep civilization idea for a D&D game. If I want to go with a fantasy setting, then it can be a difficult, restricted spell or ritual instead of tech-based. Gonna have to put some thought into this.

The Andromeda Strain

Finally read Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain for the first time today on the bus back to Toronto. Blazed though it in three hours since the science was pretty easy for me to pick up due to a combination of a couple of years of university-level science classes and the book having been written in the late sixties.

So, overall, pretty great. I especially liked the "spoilers" the book kept feeding me - the science team tries something, and the book explains the error in judgment they just made and ominously calls it a big mistake.

Spoilers ahead.