The fantastic freedom to pornify absolutely anything

"It's getting late to give you up,

I took a sip from my devil cup.

Slowly,

It's taking over me.

[...]

With the taste of your lips I'm on a ride!

You're toxic, I'm slipping under...

Taste of a poison paradise!

I'm addicted to you, don't you know that you're toxic?"

"Toxic" - Britney Spears

Disney Pixar's new animated movie, Zootopia, is spreading hype within the furry fandom for predictable reasons: the concept of the anthro (anthropomorphic animal, or, if you talk the way I talk, ♥ fur yeah ♥ ) is suddenly presented to the public in a kind, family-friendly manner. This, though, has also derived in a feeling of reluctance...

Or just don't make your characters so sexy, duh!

The furry fandom seems to have a quite rich history of sexualizing anthro characters from movies and video games, going from iconic characters like Bowser to childhood icons such as the Coyote from the Road Runner, so the collective is concerned about what message the reaction of the fandom towards Zootopia might send to the general public (NOT like non-anthro characters in all ambits are also sexualized by other fandoms and people, OF COURSE NOT).

As I so subtly suggested in brackets before, though, not only the furry fandom but pretty much everyone and their mother is guilty of this. Jessica Rabbit, Courtney Gears, Lara Croft, all those characters share the idiosyncrasies of not being anthros and being sexualized by other kinds of public systematically. A simple Google search of "Courtney Gears" can easily lead a seven-year-old Ratchet & Clank fan to the porn site Rule 34, and, believe me, that is not furries' fault. In the eighties and the early nineties, the LGBT collective was lovelily known by the public as a group of perverts who wanted to rape everything alive, so, if someone is still concerned about people's generalized opinion on their collective, there are two ways to fix the issue: either educating that people through kindness and comprehension or hiding and pretending not to belong to the collective. LGBT people who have lived the eighties and the early nineties will probably agree when I say the second option is definitely not going to change anything.

And, guess what, that is OK. I like C. Gears as the diva she is in R&C 3 and I wouldn't sexualize her, but, hey, I do not mind if someone else would. While tons and tons of hentai and ecchi porn are being generated regarding the character, nobody is forcing me to watch. I can listen to Courtney's song once and again off YouTube without seeing her boobs uncovered, and I therefore do not understand why someone would get offended by the existence of that content.

Oh, no! A make-up tutorial!

But then there is the thing: kids. You could leave your child alone with your computer dancing to Gears' robotic anthem and come back to see them naively watch her naked in an anime-styled picture because they were browsing "Courtney Gears" on Google and that's what they got... Well, Mr. and Mrs. Concerned Parent, I present you HEATHER'S GUIDE TO KEEP YOUR CHILD FROM BEING THE FIRST COMMENT IN PORNHUB. It's a very simple guide, it has only one line of text, and says the following:

"Have you ever thought about being there while they surf the net?"

Crazy idea, right? I know, you might be busy at times, right? Then what about downloading (and revising, please) the content you want your child to access and offer it to them without allowing connection to the Internet? Hey, that method came straight to my mind in just fifteen seconds, it must be not so hard after all!

So, dear furries and furry fans out there; I know you mean well, and I know all you want is your collective to be considered better by the public. That is a very legitimate goal, but it seems you haven't made up the right way towards it. If there is a reaction from the public, someone will speak up. Respond, educate, be assertive, explain, show the world some love and the world will show some understanding. We're living, now more than anytime else, in a world of changes where it's likely that everybody's ideas and explanations will be heard and given a chance sooner or later.

I prefer to be taken as free better than to be taken as normal.

Difference between languages might make some less functional than others

"Well, yes, yes, yes, I'm banging on about her again

(And again, and again, and again),

'Cause I can't get those things she's been saying off my brain!

And this time I ain't mentioning no names

(No names, no names, no names),

'Cause that would make it too damn obvious."

"Yet Again" - Charli XCX

Every language has its very own idiosyncrasies. That makes the world more complete, by learning a language one can realise how the things they might take as obvious are just something more they and only they share; in other words, learning languages is a way to open one's mind. That for, our language implies a way to see the world: once you learn a someone can only be a he or a she because there is not a singular they in your language, you tend to divide humanity in he's and she's and that's going to be all of it for you.

My mother language is Spanish, and, as most Romanic Languages, it shares the idiosyncrasy of only being able to see he's and she's. It also makes it harder to build certain kinds of sentence or refer to certain kinds of objects than English. On the other hand, I've never had a problem with English that I hadn't had with Spanish before, and I've found that most problems I found with Spanish that made me use enormous periphrasys to express a simple idea could be resolved with less than three words in English.

For that matter, I took a look at  the list of my written frustrations (a.k.a. a project that was meant to become an opinion blog in Spanish) and picked some notable examples of lacks of the Spanish language that English supplies:

• I don't know about you, but I'd get offended I was referred to as ello. I know I've already said it twice in this post, but Spanish does not offer its speakers a way to refer to persons without mentioning (and mostly assuming) their gender. Well, at least, not in singular...
• In plural, we're all men. As what I first said might imply, a language brings a way to see a way to see the world with it. In case of Spanish, we're meant to assume men significant and women only deserve representation in human collectives if they are the totality of it: plurals containing male and female individuals are inherently masculine plurals.
• Everyone has gender... even tables. When I said humans can't be gender-neutral in Spanish I should have said nothing can. Chairs, tables, cupboards, oxides, everything has what is known as immotivated gender: gender for non-sexuated objects. This implies Spanish has no way to refer to anything, human or not, without assigning a gender to it, and, sorry, but, no, not all humans want to be jailed inside a gender.
• How do you call un hombre que escala montañas? A mountain-climbing man. When it comes to needing enormous periphrasys to express something than can be said in three words, Spain is populated by experts.
• Let's talk about Geography. I've got friends in Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Montenegro, even Ukraine. And none of them speak Spanish (well, one of them tries, but they don't speak very fluently). I dare you to guess which language I use to communicate with all of them...

And, well, I've only put some (and most of them are the same, to be honest: Spanish = male or sub-male), but I think I'm missing lots and lots of occasions and examples where Spanish does a terrible job at... trying. Languages are meant to allow speakers to express anything, with the differences and connotations they want in their discourse, and that's something Spanish and Catalan both fail at.

The Maldita Lisiada

 "Don't you feel

everything, everyone

is going mental?"

"Everything's Just Wonderful" - Lily Allen

Every language has a culture behind. When it comes to Spanish, this is no exception, as a language, it recognises certain compositions and events that bring its speakers to tears of pure joy. In the case of the Spanish language, History makes it hard to find one of those after 1939... this, of course, until the Maldita Lisiada happened.

This work of art was naïvely made by Telemundo, a Latin American TV producing company, without even the thought of the possibility of it becoming a meme. After years, once time had buried it within all of the televisive junk the company represents, the Internet found it... And it did what the Internet does best: bringing it back to life... as a lisiado phoenix.

I keep thinking this is what we should study in Spanish. Because everything else about the language is irrelevant and you know it.

On the other hand, this makes up for a perfect cult movie: The Lisiada Syndrome. It  would be about a devil who possesses people making them shout "MALDITA LISIADAAAAA" all the time and spit foam. Also, it's my idea so the hero must be fat. Despite that, though, I would pay to watch it for sure. Then I would scream "MALDITA LISIADAAAAAAAA!" with all of my heart and lungs and I'd know I can finally die in peace. That's every human's life goal.

Too serious, I know :/

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.