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The Megalomaniac

Ambitious, Intelligent, Calculating

The Megalomaniac is the most prestigious of super-villain classes. If anyone is ever going to rule the world, it will probably be you.

Your main goal in life is power and domination, you have the tools to do it, and you know it. Megalomaniacs are intelligent and forceful, and they tend not to let their emotions cloud their judgment. Most of the time. They are usually found, or not found, working at the top of a huge structured organization, though many prefer to work by themselves.

The Megalomaniac has but one flaw, but its an invariably fatal one; arrogance. He knows that he can take over the world, and he isn't afraid to let you know, often elaborately and in great detail. They often do not foresee the fly in their ointment, because they do not want to admit that such a fly could exist.

Sample Megalomaniacs: Dr. Doom, Lex Luthor, Ras al'Ghul, Kang the Conqueror, Emperor Palpatine, Brain

Take The Supervillain Archetype Test at HelloQuizzy

Correlation is not causation, but...

Patterns of the spread of Internet access across the United States strongly correlate with a steep drop in rape cases in those states; states with the fastest Internet adoption show the greatest decline, and a 10% increase in household network penetration in any given region correlates to an average 7.3% decrease in rates of rape within that same region.

The results suggest that potential rapists perceive pornography as a substitute for rape. With the mass market introduction of the world wide web in the late 1990's, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary prices for pornography fell. The associated decline in rape illustrated in the analysis here is consistent with a theory, such as that in Posner (1994), in which pornography is a complement for masturbation or consensual sex, which are themselves substitutes for rape, making pornography a net substitute for rape.

Given the limitations of the data, policy prescriptions based on these results must be made with extreme care. Nevertheless, the results suggest that, in contrast to previous theories to the contrary, liberalization of pornography access may lead to declines in sexual victimization of women. The results suggest that the internet has had large effects on important social behaviors; further exploration of these effects is necessary to fully understand these results, however.

Kendall, Todd: Pornography, Rape, and the Internet, Clemson University Law & Economics Seminar, 2006

Does the normalization of anal sex, shaving, bukkake, etc. help or hinder sexual self-actualization?

In a previous post I relayed the conclusion to a paper that claims that the widespread availability of pornography on the Internet has been accompanied by a strong drop in rape.

What fascinates me most about this is the (thus far) anecdotal counter-claim that the growing body of "extreme" pornography cheapens relationships and encourages men and women to try acts they normally wouldn't and that don't contribute to a sense of intimacy, just because it's in porn. Sodomy and bukkake come to mind as two of those things that, unless you're really curious about it, don't contribute to intimacy. (On the other hand, if you are into sodomy, it can contribute much to your understanding of yourself and your partner. As they say in Nigeria, email me for more details. Kidding, kidding...)

I can't help but wonder if we're seeing both a broadening and a narrowing of sexual expression in this country: on the one hand, people who have the personal and intellectual framework to consciously explore their sexuality have a huge buffet of materials from which to draw inspiration. On the other, people who would otherwise have had mundane but satisfying sexual lives might feel more compelled to experiment with outrageous sexual activities, either by their normalization in pornography (I remember when anal sex was a big freaking deal in porn and nobody shaved anything, but these days, having pubic hair is the kink and most porn shows women taking cock in all three orifices as if that were expected and normative) or under pressure from a partner who has pornography-encouraged expectations.

In defense of "utilize" and "normative"

The other day I was driven to shrill madness by a job posting that asked if I could "utilize the word press technology" (to which I responded, "Yes, I can use and develop for Wordpress, but probably not for you").

Just a few minutes ago, I posted an entry wondering about whether or not pornography cheapened some relationships because it depicted sodomy as "expected and normative," and wondered if I hadn't just bitten myself with hypocrisy. (One of the things I will always thank Usenet for: it taught me how to spell "hypocrisy" correctly.) Perhaps I should have said that pornography depicts sodomy as "expected and normal."

There is a difference, however: "Normal" is what people do. "Normative" is what people expect. A normative declaration is a prescriptive one: it says what people ought to do. Pornography might, in fact, depict anal sex as normal: certainly it is in the pornoverse. But it's pornography's depiction of anal sex as normative that is problematic: "All chicks dig getting fucked in the ass" is a normative depiction, and we should challenge that depiction if we can and try to substitute for "all" the much more sensible "some."

Likewise, I think there are places where one "utilizes" Wordpress. If you push it hard enough, plug in enough stuff, and write your own code, Wordpress can be used as a CMS like Joomla or Drupal or even Django, as a base of code that one can utilize: "take full advantage of; to make do with something not originally used for a purpose." For Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union, for example, I "utilized" the Wordpress treewalking engine to create a previously non-existent relationship between post categories and pages. But I doubt the job poster people were seeking that kind of Wordpress development.

Still, if they are, I'm their man.

I have the imagination of a twelve-year-old boy

Be glad you don't have it

I know, I shouldn't mock the vocabulary of anthropologists, but this exhibit at the Ohanapekosh vistor's center in Mt. Rainier National Park made me giggle.

Playing with my camera: Camping Day 2: Silver Falls.

( Big picture of Silver Falls, 1000 pixels wide. )

Camping, Day 2

Girls crossing Silver Falls

The family at Grove of the Patriarchs

Singing Chipmunk

We awoke to the sound of hammers and chainsaws. The bathroom in the "B" loop, where we were, was being rebuilt, and the rustic, log-cabin look required a lot of archaic machine tools.

I spoke to one of the construction workers there and it turns out that this is all they do. They're all Federal employees, and it turns out that the kind of log cabin construction that goes on in Rainier is so specialized that only about two dozen men are trained to do it, and this is what they do: go around repairing bathrooms and the "historic buildings" made from logs cut with saws and fitted with chisels.

I was pleased to note that my back doesn't hurt nearly as much as I feared it would. Omaha made a great fire and we all enjoyed a morning breakfast of warm cereal. The items that I listed as missing, I ran into the nearby town of Packwood to pick up, and then returned to get ready for our first hike of the day. We made tuna sandwiches and packed trail mix and then we were ready to be on our way. I caught a glimpse of myself in a bathroom mirror before we actually hit the trail: ack, with my Ironman glasses and REI overnight pack, I'm a stereotype: Pacific NW Hiker, Bulky Athletic Type.

We walked up the Silver Falls trail (about 3½ miles) to the falls (the big panorama in my previous post is at 46°45'18.86"N, 121°33'36.10"W and, p.s., Google Earth now runs fabulous in Linux!), which are huge, beautiful, churning, and then up the west side of the falls to the road, across the road to a picnic area set aside for day trippers. We stopped to picnic. Our sandwiches and water contrasted well with the family next to us, who downed huge sandwiches along with buckets of potato salad and even an open tub of Cool Whip-- what it was meant to accompany, I know not.

Then another ½ miles in to the Grove of the Patriarchs. The ground was so packed we walked it barefoot, except for Yamaraashi-chan, and that was delightful. Along the way the girls stopped and played in the river along with a couple of other families. Omaha was disappointed to see that all of the elk activity she'd seen earlier in the grove was gone.

Along the way we became aware of a relatively new phenomenon: agressive panhandling by the local "wild"life. In the past, we'd visited mostly remote areas (obscure corners of Mt. Baker, or the eastern face of the Olympic Range), but here, where there was lots of human activity, the wildlife was much more confident in approaching humans and expecting to get something out of us. This was especially true at the Grove of the Patriarchs, as it's a very short hike and thousands of people walk through it every day.

After the grove and it's massive, beautiful trees, some of the largest on Mt. Rainier, we walked back, taking the eastern loop. Along the way we saw that dark-furred chipmunk it the bottom image, crooning a very eerie song that faded away as we approached, but never quite disappeared entirely.

Dinner was hot dogs and s'mores for dessert. We tried to play Set, but we have to face reality: Yamaraashi-chan is so skilled at it that nobody else was scoring anything at all, and eventually we had to call it quits and play something else. Give Me The Brain made for a better game.

At bedtime, Omaha read to us aloud from a chapter of the children's classic, Heidi.

I don't know what Jesus is doing, but I hope it's consensual

I don't know what Jesus is doing to that deer, but I hope it's consensual.

I took this photo at a "rest park" sandwiched between two churches in Packwood, WA, on my way out of town after a supply run. Packwood is a single strip town, just some businesses on both sides of the highway out of Mount Rainier National Park serving the outdoorsman community. It has no cell-phone coverage and only one radio station, KACS Christian Radio (naturally), but given that this is Washington and Ohanapekosh is one of four major camping areas on the mountain and visited by a lot of Seattlites, there were four coffee shops, all with free high-speed WiFi.

Naturally, I had to take this photo, if only to mock it.