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unnecessarily retrograde male chauvinism
Friday, March 28 2014
It was a rainy morning with temperatures in the high 30s, though it wasn't quite rainy enough to dissuade me from walking the dogs and even bringing my firewood gathering hardware. I took a shortcut down the escarpment from the Chamomile Headwaters Trail to the Stick Trail and salvaged some beautiful dead Red Oak (or perhaps Black Oak) from a tree near the Stick Trail.
My Lightroom plugin client came over today and it was a little embarrassing because this thing called a "cloning tool," which I'd thought was working, was instead totally broken. Usually the client gets unnecessarily huffy about such things, but somehow it ended up being a good meeting anyway, mostly because he watched me taking very good notes of the things he wanted me to implement.
Michæl, my other colleague in Los Angeles, was recently at Disney World in Orlando (it was a work thing) and enjoyed watching episodes of Naked & Afraid in his hotel room. So today I downloaded a bunch of episodes and watched them at my computer while doing other things (including drinking a fair amount of wine). Naked & Afraid is yet another reality show where two people are dropped into nature and expected to survive (in this case for 21 days), with the added conceit that they are one man and one woman who do not know each other. And they're not wearing any clothes. This suggests that there will be sexual tension, but the episodes I watched were surprisingly unsexy. Many of the co-survivalists quickly come to dislike each other, a process often exacerbated by unnecessarily retrograde male chauvinism on the part of the male co-survivor.
This evening I (as my troll Suzy) spent a fair amount of time in the Facebook group where the the memes for one of the more well-known libtroll Facebook pages are generated and discussed (among other things). The memes typically get posted by the members and the best are selected by the admins, branded with the page's logo, and posted, and some of them "go viral" from there. One mememaker wanted to make a meme based on Miley Cyrus' cover art for her CD Bangerz, but he claimed his Photoshop skills weren't good enough to do something he needed doing: change the wording of the neon sign behind Miley to read "Benghazi" instead of "Bangerz." I consider myself competent with Photoshop if not especially skilled, so I (as Suzy) jokingly cranked out a version that read "Penis" instead of "Bangerz," saying that I had something else on my mind (Suzy's character is repulsive but oversexed). That had been surprisingly easy, so I just went for it and made one that read "Bengazi," somehow neglecting the "h." It took a further ten minutes to edit that and include an h, looking (at least to the untrained eye) like it really was a neon sign displaying the word, "Benghazi." The key to pulling this off was to reuse parts of existing letters to build the new ones that were needed. Thus the "n" becomes a component in the "h," whose tall ascender was sampled from the descender on the "g." The "i" was just a piece of the "n" without any dot. To get rid of any noise and leftover scraps, I made heavy use of the clone tool. You can see what I'm talking about here:
The original cover.
Now it says "penis."
"Benghazi" without the "h."
Ah, that's the ticket!
The version once the meme-creator put text on it and it was branded to be released into the wild.
I didn't think much of it, but others in the group (many of whom are snide and contrary) seemed genuinely impressed by the quality of my work. This made me think that perhaps my Photoshop skills are better than I think they are.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?140328 feedback
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