I was bored, so I took a look at the statistics of Littlest Things (a.k.a. The Effects of Boredom)

(WARNING, the Eurovision live version is much better and lacks the brain-melting autotune)

"Beep-beep-uh-oh-oh

Everybody does a show!

Oo-oo-uh-oh-oh

If you like it, click and go!"

"The Social Network Song" - Valentina Monetta

Once you post something on the Internet, you're willing for some Greek man called Kostas to find it and tell you he wants to take you to his country and be your man forever... What? It's only me, you say? Well, uh... It's not that, I mean... Uh...

Well, so, as you know, I post things on the Internet; not only because it's mandatory for English class but also because I actually have something to say and share with the world, regardless of whether it's Greek strong hairy muscleguts or not... Let's just forbid the terms for the rest of this entry, okay?

So, as a person who wants to share opinions and thoughts with the world, I'm also a person who would like to have some kind of interaction with their readers (you can comment on my posts, by the way. It's possible. Come on, give that comment button some love) and, concretely, a person who likes to see what those numbers at the audience meters mean. That for, I sometimes check the Stats tab, specially when I'm bored. One could say it's just to feed my ego (oh well...) but I think it's interesting. So, I checked it on my blog for last year, Littlest Things, and this is what I found out:

Love you, Russia!... Please, don't harm me :'(

I think I can be proud to say that at least only 55'66% (o_o) of the visitors were from my own country, which means that 568/1281 (44'34%) of the people who has ever stepped into Littlest Things are international cuties who either read something written by me or just got there by mistake and left less than 10 seconds later.

There are Russians that perhaps like what I say, lots of them. Russia is not in my must-visit list (let's check: Greece, Greece, Greece, Montenegro, Greece... no, not Russia), but it stands out as a country that confuses me. It's maybe because I live in the pro-US side of the world, but most things I hear about Russia are quite horrible. I'd really love to talk to a Russian person willing to make me see that Russia is full of beautiful people who don't want all of us LGBT people to hang from trees as lifeless corpses...

Whether you write in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Montenegrin, Greek, Romanian or Swahili, the US are going to be in your top 3. Why? I don't know, but it also happens in The Meltdowning Potato (as of today, the daily statistics show the United States to hold a 4:6 (so, a 2:3) proportion with Spain, being, of course, Spain the 6) and even in my Catalan blog (in all time statistics, the US hold a 26:33 proportion with Spain... I wonder how many of those visitors understood a word of what's written there)!

My posts' titles are sometimes a bit of a clickbait. It's not that I want to change that, I don't think of it as a misleading clickbait but rather as a door to a probably interesting reading (or to a mush of unfortunate words, everything is opinions). Some wake more interest than others, and that's okay.

Unlike my first thoughts suggested, some people might enter my blog to actually read what's written in it and even my opinion, as shown by the superiority of interest-waking titles, meaning that, well, that they wake interest.

The only thing left to check would be the traffic sources. I don't think there is much to say about them: most visitors come from the classroom's 4eso2015 blog and some of my classmates'. There's also some links to the images posted (mainly the one with the sign that reads "Women are guilty of domestic violence too" from the entry "Time to fight for men's rights" and the one with the housewife from the entry "Why do men cheat on women?") and some google searches. On the other hand, all of them together don't get to be 1281 visitors (not even 100, actually), so those statistics probably miss some major traffic sources worth mentioning (there is an actually really sexy furry drawing by Grisser there, how did a man with a sign and a sad housewife attract more people than that?)...

So, sorry for this quite pointless but figure-filled post. I was really bored (the Holiday Effect) and, well, I thought all those observations I was making on those statistics were curious and worth of mention in this blog (I admit my bad humour and dirty mind filled gaps in this entry, sorry about that). I hope you enjoyed it, though, as well as my other posts. There isn't much to comment about this (unless you're a musclegut willing to make me yours Russian and want to open my eyes to the actual open-minded Russia), but I'd love to see your comments in some of my other "Your Say" posts!

Is technology really that much functional?

"Hopeless?

No, no, no;

Baby, you left me alone!"

"Keep On Moving" - Dover

My brother and I have been laughing out loud at his cell's problems. It goes crazy with pop-ups about apps closing because of errors while we, with tears of laughter, give absurd diagnostics to it. The conclusion is that my brother's poor cell phone is suffering from sudden delirium tremens, and the issue comes to be that, unlike the human affection, this is not going to go away in a few weeks.

After throwing the hallucinating gadget to the trash and replacing it with BlueStacks for my brother to use his apps on his laptop, we had a conversation about it. As always, it was full of puns and, well, delirium tremens, but it had some actual points related to technology as well. At the end, we ended up making fun of the conspiranoia of AIs running the Earth in the future... since they would probably end up trembling with lots of hallucinations in less than a year.

But the problem is that lots of estates of our society tend to rely on these little systematically mental-pathology-suffering buggies, making it a hard thing to handle to have your cell phone suffer from weird things, which happens to be quite usual. This makes relying on technology a rather dysfunctional attitude to carry... but still a common one.

It will reset at 03:14:08 due to a lack of further binary figures

The thing is, once we rely more and more on technology, we should also be able to think of a way to escape its fatal and unavoidable end. There is a rumour which seems to be proven but sounds like a conspiranoia as well regarding a major failure in every system and program written in C language that relies in dates and hours in the year 2038.

I agree that technology provides a more efficient and, sometimes... well, rarely, reliable way of working, communicating and sharing, but it fails. From viruses created by freaks willing to see your porn to mistakes (intentional or not) made by the actual creator of your device or the program you're using, it might fail any moment, even by the time you're reading this.

No, even though it's December the 28th, this is not a joke made to introduce a super-scary virus in your computer. Well, as I said before, you could be getting a virus right now, but I can ensure it's most likely not my fault. At least, not intentionally!

Hiding as a mandatory behaviour pattern

 "Say what you say,

Do what you do,

Feel what you feel

As long as it's real!"

"Take What You Take" - Lily Allen 

I have a "problem," and it consists on the fact that I always get people to know me once I get confident. It's never really affected me negatively: people around me know who I am, they know I'm uncomfortable with my right-now look and situation, they know the kind of men I'm attracted to, they know how important these things are for me and it's never got me any consequence.

I know, though, as soon as others' opinions get to have more weight, in situations where they could get me hired or fired, I'll eventually have to hide and Heather as she is will have to be reduced to the continent of a tiny box well hidden between my dress and my then-new body. I actually find that terrible, but the it's-weird-so-it's-bad rule has a wide variety of targets, in the center of which there are people with "weird" aspirations and priorities, e.g., me.

The interesting detail comes when I get to take a look at those giving their opinions about me and realise they share the idiosyncrasies they comment. Let's face it: you can be cis, but you can't fall to the 100% of your gender's pressures and musts... well, you actually can, but, well, have fun with the psychiatrist. You can't completely be the norm. Your experiences define you, and unless you've always lived in a variety-free bubble without hearing anything about dreams, aspirations, pleasure or anything that can differenciate one person from another in general, you're probably a pervert who dreams of things that don't exist yet just like me. That's what makes us human.

Of couse it's still a funny idea... I'm writing it down...

So, no, it's not "me," it's not "my" problem. It's everyone's problem. A biased judgement could get any of you homeless in a mid-term future and there are lots of variables that play a role: there are people who will judge you for using make-up, for wearing a fedora, for being a white straight cis male, for being a black lesbian trans woman, for being red-haired, for being too fat as a 50kg person, for being too thin as a 49'999kg person, for being you, for being me, for being any of our teachers or even for being a cat. Anything can be judged and it could be really significant in certain contexts. Of course if I shout "I used to have a penis and I like hairy fat men!" in the middle of my workplace I'm most probably getting more chances to be fired than any of you for, let's say, scratching your head in a corner? It's obvious, but it doesn't imply that your boss couldn't see you, take your scratching as a major offense and fire you. It's unlikely but still possible.

But let's not talk about scratching your head, that could be done by anyone; let's talk about you. I don't know who's reading right now, but I'm pretty sure there's a part of you that people would consider "weird" or "unacceptable" or "bad." It might or might not be related to your life aspirations, sexual likes, hobbies, identity or situation. I'm also pretty sure you're aware of it. First, relax, it most likely hurts absolutely nobody, and that means it's OK. The issue comes with expressing yourself... all of yourself, that too. You can't.

I guess the best we can do now is show the world while we can that we exist with our "weirdness" and "perversion" and we're perfectly viable as progressing and contentable human beings. That's why I express myself with the rest of my social estate (i.e. the rest of students). I like to put my furry drawings right next to my 10 in Biology (yes, the thing has its irony), show someone else I know well and say "this is what I get for being me."

At the end of the day, being Heather is simply wonderful. I like who I am.

Caitlyn Jenner's interview in TIME Magazine brings negative reactions among transgenders

"I know exactly what I want and who I want to be,

I know exactly why I walk and talk like a machine,"

"Oh No!" - Marina And The Diamonds

(SOURCE: http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a50590/caitlyn-jenner-time-magazine-transphobia/)

Caitlyn Jenner, famous because of her MtF transition, has become a figurehead within the Trans Community. Several weeks ago, though, she offered an interview to TIME Magazine, which had set her among the Person Of The Year ranking, which sprang mixed opinions within the public.

The firstly-published interview on the magazine was a short version where some questions were skipped in order to make only the most important point part of it. It had a good reception by the Trans Community, as most of her points about being a transgender until then, and brought no problem. Recently, though, TIME has released in its online version the full post, and it hasn't been received as

much acceptation.

From the several points of her that stand as the most controversial from the so mentioned interview, there are two major highlights to take a look at, the first one being

"I think it's much easier for a trans woman or a trans man who authentically kind of looks and plays the role. So what I call my presentation. I try to take that seriously. I think it puts people at ease. If you're out there and, to be honest with you, if you look like a man in a dress, it makes people uncomfortable. So the first thing I can do is try to present myself well. I want to dress well. I want to look good. When I go out, as Kim says, you've got to rock it because the paparazzi will be there."

The reason of the controversy surrounding this fragment is how it fails to recognise the dimensionality of the Trans Community: the fact that someone born male wants to dress up as a girl doesn't mean they want to have boobs and a vagina; actually, it doesn't even mean they identify themselves as women at all.

The second of her points that brought strongest reactions was to

"be intelligent on the subject."

The detail in it that caused most people to cringe was the fact that she had missed the diversity within her own community, making her seem inherently not intelligent on the subject.

As the article goes on, the objective facts start fading away and the author's opinion becomes the central point, so I'm going to stop my summary here and give my opinion instead. We already saw in Ellen's show that C. Jenner is rather a conservative traditionalist, we shouldn't pretend we're surprised as we're doing now. On the other hand, while it's true that Jenner is not an ideal role model for progressive transgenders, I find her simply amazing because of how she says what she thinks without being influenced by society's stereotypes about transgenders: it's true that everyone should look normally to every kind of human behaviour, but it's also important to remember that being under an LGBT tag does NOT mean sharing those views, and that is great because it shows us that we're all different.

It's okay to educate people on equality and diversity, but it's also great that not all of those people to be educated are the same kind of person.

"Everyone's At It" as a rebel song

"Why can't we all, all just be honest?

Admit to ourselves that everyone's on it

From grown politicians to young adolescents

Prescribing themselves antidepressants."

"Everyone's At It" - Lily Allen

Lily Allen is known for being cynical in her songs. It's then common to see her work qualified as "rebel" for complaining, sometimes openly and sometimes in a subtle way, about some person, group of people or just a characteristic of our world or society.

"Everyone's At It", first track from her second album It's Not Me, It's You (2009), is a clear example of that. It deals about drug abuse, mostly on teenagers but also in adult estates such as "grown politicians." Surprisingly, though, it doesn't only talk about illegal drug use, but also about prescriptions and the abuse of prescribed drugs such as the Prozac or sleeping pills.

Let's talk about ideal authority

"I get involved

But I'm not advocating

You got an opinion

Yeah, you're well up for slating."

"Everyone's At It" - Lily Allen

(Some statements on this post respond to a mindset I don't share anymore.)

Ideals, opinions and priorities vary from one person to another; that's how it is and how it should be. That's what makes us interesting as existing entities: we all behave differently as individuals, perhaps following some common patterns (I'm not going to discuss the essentiality of those again) but, in some way, uniquely. This means we, within our years of existence, have reached our very own result of an evolution nobody else has gone through, and that is what makes us a significant unit among human society, because nobody else will ever be us.

Once stated that we, with our Marxism or our technocratism, are significant and important with our ideals, I must throw a question: should there be a dominant ideal?

To put a now-popular example, it's easily reasonable that we should all look for equality for every human being, but even among those whose objective is reaching equal treatment for all of humanity there are different focuses and points of view. This, per se, joins my first point to make the most positive equation ever though... The issue here is, and now I'm going to start a fire, "feminism."

There's a reason why I put that on quotations: feminism per se is not a problem, but most people putting themselves under the tag "feminist" are often discriminative against one human collective or another (e.g. TERFs, RadFems, etc.), so it becomes a spiky tag that brings the word "discrimination" to several minds. That for, I speak as an egalitarian humanist, but in no way as a feminist, and I'd agree with everyone whose priority was equality for all humans, even if they had chosen to tag themselves that way.

Now, considering those are ideals, why are they an issue within diversity of opinions? Well, the problems come when discriminative people under the tag "feminist" discriminate those who look for equality but don't identify with the so mentioned adjective, counting, because of the name, with the inconditional support of actual feminism and everything that carries the same name. This ends up to make it acceptable for everything that smells of "feminism" to discriminate anything and anyone who disagrees at some point, leading to a state of ideal authority and, eventually, to an intellectual dictatory where everything published must agree with the dominant point of view in order to avoid punishment and shaming, and that is the issue.

This was just an example, but as some ideals and movements get popular the same kind of opressing extremism might appear in other topics of debate such as veganism or religion. And dominant ideals, even the ones we agree with, are something to question and, sometimes, fight against.

I'm a humanist, and I want to tell you about it

"Oh, the Queen of Peace

Always does her best to please

Is it any use?

Somebody's got to lose."

"Queen of Peace" - Florence + The Machine

(This is not a book review. Though I wanted to use my opinion on a book to open this text, I also preferred to focus on something else in this concrete post.)

The Spanish reader was terrible to me. As one of the critiques mentioned in the exam pointed out, it's a matter of entering into the story as an ethicless a**hole or never entering at all, and, as I've shown once or twice in this blog, my ethics and ideals are always accompanying me, making any kind of anti-human cynicism something to look down to.

That led me to leave the subjective part of the reading exam for the end so it was the only thing I missed: everyone around seemed to have found the book hilarious, and an exceptional opinion in a reading exam will always have a chance of pounding the summary alarm, which translates into "she probably hasn't even read the book and just got the plot without the humour." Sorry, but I, personally, can't find the brutal murdering of a man who was retaking his life with newfound hopes funny (have I mentioned he was on a wheelchair?) in spite of how many times the sadistic author tries to nail down unfortunate jokes a person with a sense of poise and rationality would hardly ever get (okay, I admit having laughed out loud with the "estás pa'llá" thing, but that's all). If that gets me a fail in Spanish, I'm pretty okay with it, even though I spent a good amount of time reading it and a good amount of nights without sleep due to the terrible feeling I ended up with, because that's precisely the worst: the realism of the novel implies such events could be taking place right now at some place, and it's hard to sleep with that going down your throat.

The reason why these aspects of the book had such a hold on me has been suggested several times both in here and in Littlest Things, but I think this needed a concrete post to express it. That for, I'm profitting the chance to tell you about the ethics I live by, as branded with iron in the deepest of my thoughts:

1. Every human, for being so, is the greatest of existing things and must be treated as of it.

This means nobody deserves to be hurt by default in any way, and by "hurt" I mean anything the concrete human being considers negative and undesirable in that concrete context. When it comes to responding to negative actions (see postulate 2), the punishment must be given taking into consideration the opinion of those affected by the negative action and in any case must have a similar moral weight than the so mentioned action (and that makes two noes to shooting the character mentioned before in the head, in case someone was thinking about taking it as a consequence of his in comparison harmless actions).

2. An action must only be considered negative if the affected third persons (in case there are any) consider so.

This means a human action is only negative if it affects others in a way they don't agree with. This also leaves doing drugs in private, taking junk food, working out and playing sports in the same level of acceptability, since the only person affected agrees and decides to get the action happening. If a person has chosen to be negatively affected by a human action (e.g. "I saw this gay couple kissing and it affected my morals because, you know, God and stuff, and I couldn't look away because, uh... That question is affecting me negatively!") the case probably requires a closer analysis.

3. A punishment to a negative action must never affect the way a human being is treated by others unless the consequences of the so mentioned action involve a similar effect to the affected persons.

To offer a real-life example, this would disable public shaming as a punishment of anything but public shaming, and even in the case of public shaming the significance of it must be similar to the significance of the initial action.

I accept that ethics are subjective, but I think assuming "some are naughty and some are nice" just like Father Christmas just does NOT work. Our starting point when it comes to passing judgement on people and their actions should be the acknowledgement of the fact that good and evil are subjective creations of our society and that, regardless of what we do in our lives, we're all still human beings and like to be treated with some love. Someone we'd consider evil might be able to become someone we'd consider good if treated with love and affection by us. At the end of the day, most of our behaviours come from our life experiences and learning, and we're constantly getting them new.