Saturday, July 20, 2013

Willow: Lesbian?

Not too long ago, I finally watched the final season of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. After a rather disappointing sixth season, I was glad to see that the final season was much better. However, there is one issue that bothered me about this season, and that's the relationship between Kenedy and Willow.

The problem I had with it was that it never really felt like a reeal dynamic relationship, flowing from who the characters are. I know I am drawing up double standards when I ask such a thing of a relationship in Buffy, but don't necessarily ask the same thing of a relationship in another show, but I feel it's justified. After all, all other relationships in Buffy did flow from the characters. Shows that perform better in a specific aspect, should be held to a higher standard in that aspect. Shows that perform better in many aspects, should be held to a higher standard in all of those aspects.

I had my suspicions that she was shoe-horned in to cement the fact that Willow was gay, even without Tara, when I saw the relationship on the screen. I've never thought that she was 100% gay, considering her meaningful relationship with Oz and her feelings towards Xander in the early seasons. Still, the very choice to keep her interested in girls wasn't the problem, really. It was more the way it was done (adding in this relationship basically just for that purpose) and why it was done.

At least, what Joss Whedon said was the reason for this. I believe it was in an interview with a gay magazine that he said about her having a relationship with a man post-Tara "We do that now, and we will be burned alive. And possibly justifiably. We can't have Willow say, 'Oh, cured now, I can go back to cock!' Willow is not going to be straddling that particular fence. She will just be gay." I have a lot of respect for this man and his works, but this just really annoys me. I suppose it's the lack of understanding about gay-ness, though.

I am straight myself. What I take that to mean is that so far, I haven't been truly attracted to another male. However, I am rather open-minded and I know quite a number of gay people. In that, I have found that the number of words we have comes up short. We have a "white" (gay), a "black" (straight) and perhaps a single shade of grey (bi). The reality, though, has a near infinite number of shades of grey (more than 50 anyway).

There's probably a lot of people who consider themselves straight, but do in fact feel somewhat attracted to the same sex, but don't act on that for various reasons (such as, the attraction being rather minor, being told that such attractions are bad, or even just not realizing such attractions can be of a romantic nature). The same is probably true when you take gay as the base-line. However, in those cases the gay people generally did more exploring of their sexual orientation and they are already facing much more social stigma, which I think leads to such feelings less often being repressed.

In fact, I know two lesbian girls who have each been in a relationship with a single guy (well, each with a different guy, but neither with more than one guy). And I'm not talking before they came out or realized their sexual orientation, but after. One of the two has even gotten together with the same guy a couple of times after their relationship (when neither was in a relationship). I really wouldn't say it makes either of them "not lesbian", I'd say it makes them able to think outside the lack of terms we have for the issue.

That's sort of what I felt Willow was like. I didn't know where exactly she fell in the range from "straight but into Tara" to "interested mainly in girls, but into some guys as well", but I did feel she was somewhere in that range. She fell in love and developed this relationship with Tara even before she realized that she could fall for girls. That's why I feel that after Tara's death she could have dated guys again. Of course, it wouldn't have been diving straight into bed with the first guy she met, but rather a path of finding out what her exact orientation was, and then maybe dating a guy again. I've also felt that that guy could have been Xander, but that, I suppose, was primarily wishful thinking.

Of course, in the show there were plenty of references to Willow being gay prior to her relationship with Kennedy. These ranged from Faith (while in Buffy's body) stating that "Willow's not driving stick anymore" to Willow trying to turn a guy into a woman after she's fallen in love with him because of a spell. However, most of these examples weren't by Willow herself and when they were, they generally were at a time when it didn't really matter, as she was with Tara. For those reasons, I've thought of those things as the characters thinking in the black and white terms of gay and straight. However, in the end, it was in fact the writers who thought in those terms. After all, how can one ever justify a straight relationship again after having had a gay one?

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Zwarte Piet is geen Racisme

I generally don't write in Dutch - I think this might be the first time - but today the topic just requires me to do so. If I were to write this in English, I would be struggling with either poor translations or dutch terms all the time. And besides, it's about a Dutch cultural thing anyway, if you're not Dutch it probably won't be clear unless I add a bunch of explanation and even if I did, there's a good chance you still don't care.

Gister las ik een artikel van de beweging "Zwarte Piet is racisme". Ik kwam de beweging via Facebook tegen. Ik wist dat deze discussie een paar jaar geleden was gevoerd, maar ik had niet het idee dat dit nog steeds iets was. Daarnaast had de context weinig te maken met deze naam. Om dan toch maar eens te kijken of dit nou serieus was ben ik toen maar eens op zoek gegaan naar de website die hierbij hoorde.

De website was niet bepaald duidelijk en het artikel dat het meest in het oog sprong was er één over een gedeelte van deze actie die de harde kern van de beweging dan weer te commercieel vond. Vervolgens was er ook een artikel over iemand die een stuk schreef hoe beledigend zwarte piet wel niet was.

Ik vind het idee dat zwarte piet racisme zou zijn echt onzin. Klinkklare onzin. Het probleem is dat ik nog geen enkele sluitende reden heb gehoord waarom dit dan wel niet zo zou zijn. Mocht iemand mij een goede reden weten te vertellen dan zal ik mijn mening bijstellen. Tot die tijd, vind ik het onzin.

Een betoog over dit onderwerp begint eigenlijk altijd bij de geschiedenis. Immers, de Zwarte Pieten moeten toch echt ooit gewoon als slaven zijn begonnen. Dit mag dan zo zijn, maar dit heeft erg weinig te maken met het huidige feest en de huidige karakters die met de Pieten worden neergezet. Racisme gaat niet over de oorsprong van een traditie, maar is iets dat zich in het heden afspeelt en wat voor een effect het nu heeft.

De andere kant is juist dat Zwarte Piet een zeer positief gevoel opwekt. Een enkeling zal misschien bang worden van het feit dat deze mannen zomaar je huis binnen kunnen komen, maar over het algemeen zijn kinderen blij met deze brengers van cadeaus en snoepgoed. Daarnaast worden de Pieten meestal (onder andere door de media) als knullig neergezet, maar ik denk echt niet dat kinderen hierin een Zwarte Piet door de war zullen halen met een ander persoon met donkere huidskleur.

Het verhaal ging verder over hoe iemand Zwarte Piet was genoemd en dat erg vervelend vond. Dit hielp mij om te begrijpen waar dit hele idee vandaan komt, maar ik ben wel van mening dat iemand die dit als reden ziet waarom Zwarte Piet niet (alleen) meer zwart mag zijn niet heeft begrepen waar het probleem in deze situatie lag.

Er zijn twee mogelijkheden. De eerste is dat dit met opzet was en dus bedoeld was om de persoon in kwestie te kwetsen. Als hier het woord Zwarte Piet niet had bestaan, dan was hier wel een ander woord gebruikt, en dan was het waarschijnlijk een kwetsender woord geweest, aangezien de meeste kwetsende woorden niet zijn verbonden met het beeld van snoep en cadeaus. Het probleem is hier niet Zwarte Piet, maar racisme. Zwarte Piet is een vervangbaar stuk gereedschap dat wordt gebruikt, maar met het weghalen van dit gereedschap wordt er niks aan het probleem gedaan.

De andere mogelijkheid is dat het niet kwetsend was bedoeld, maar wel zo is overgekomen. Zwarte Piet gaf hier misschien een mogelijkheid tot deze situatie en het was hier niet voorgevallen als hij een andere kleur had gehad, maar uiteindelijk is dit gewoon een situatie die soms voorkomt en niet inherent met Zwarte Piet te maken heeft. Soms gebruikt iemand een term voor iemand anders die niet vervelend is bedoeld, maar die de ander wel vervelend vindt. Het echte probleem hier is de communicatie. Als deze persoon communiceert dat hij of zij het vervelend vindt om zo genoemd te worden, dan zal de ander daarmee ophouden (of terugkomen bij het eerste geval, waarbij we al hebben gezien dat Zwarte Piet niet het kwaad is). Dat deze persoon eenmaal Zwarte Piet is genoemd is vervelend, maar zulke dingen gebeuren nou eenmaal.

Het enige wat nog enigszins overblijft is het beeld van slavernij dat mensen krijgen wanneer ze de intocht of andere beelden van het Sinterklaasfeest zien. Echter, ik denk eigenlijk niet dat er nou daadwerkelijk zoveel Nederlanders zijn die dit idee hierbij krijgen. Het grootste deel van de Nederlanders is immers met dit feest opgegroeid. Voor de mensen die hier op latere leeftijd zijn komen wonen is het misschien even wennen de eerste keer, maar daarna zullen ze zich toch over dit gevoel heen moeten kunnen zetten. Mensen die dat niet kunnen zullen het erg lastig krijgen in het leven aangezien ze wel vaker dingen zullen tegenkomen die ze niet fijn of zelfs kwetsend vinden. Daarnaast vind ik ook dat mensen die naar Nederland verhuizen zich wel enigszins aan de Nederlandse cultuur mogen aanpassen. Tot slot zien buitenlanders dit feest vaak als racistisch, maar dat is niet echt aan de orde, want mensen die het feest niet vieren hebben er ook simpelweg niks mee te maken.

Eigenlijk heb ik zelf maar een enkel argument om Zwarte Piet niet te laten veranderen. Dat is dat het een traditie is. Het zou jammer zijn van de vele liedjes (en van de kinderen die hierdoor hun geloof in Sinterklaas verliezen, maar dat is een compleet ander verhaal en niet een reden om dit niet te veranderen) en het zou simpelweg een enorm geforceerde verandering in een volksfeest van het hele land zijn.

Ik zal meteen toegeven dat de reden tegen de verandering niet de sterkste reden ooit is. Maar, aangezien ik nog geen enkele reden heb gehoord waarom dit racisme is en daarmee waarom Zwarte Pieten niet zouden mogen, is het meer dan genoeg om mijn mening te winnen. En overigens, je moet niet gaan veranderen simpelweg om het veranderen.


Friday, July 12, 2013

Babylon S5: The Claudia Christian Story

Long time no see! I haven't posted in a while but today I felt like writing a blog post. This time I'll write about the series I have recently watched: Babylon 5.

In fact, I am going to give my view on the departure of Claudia Christian from the series. It's an interesting story because JMS (the show's creator) has always been active on the internet, even though the internet was in its infancy when he was making this series.

Because of this, different parties gave their side of the story, which has conveniently been archived here: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/misc/cc-leave.html. It clearly wasn't an amicable break, but the question just what happened still remains. Today, I'm going to tell what I think happened. It's been quite some time, but I've just watched the series and just want to write down my thoughts about this all.

Before I begin, though, I want to say that if anyone involved ends up reading this (and I'd be honored) I don't want them to feel offended, I'm just doing my personal speculation here and I don't by any means think I'm right. With that out of the way, let's just get started.

In the end, what I think happened was a case of miscommunication. JMS believed it wasn't, but I think he was looking in the wrong place. He was looking at the communication between Claudia and himself (and the other cast members). I think the main miscommunication was in a different place, and because people weren't aware of that, things that seemed like they had to be very clear involved some miscommunication.

One of the things that caught my eye on that page is how JMS's first post doesn't mention the fewer episodes debacle, as it was not an issue to him. Then, Christian tells about wanting to do fewer episodes and only after that Straczynski talks about the whole issue. It is later yet that he digs up another piece of information: her wanting to get paid for the episodes she didn't do.

The first thing to note here is that JMS was offended by Christian not finding his promise enough to go on; I don't believe JMS is a kind person when he's offended. The second part is that Christian's agent got a negative on doing less episodes (she was very adamant about not doing such calls herself). I am assuming that both are telling the truth, and under that assumption, it seems it wasn't Christian but her agent who made the demand for her to be paid for episodes she wasn't in. It's sour to single someone out like that, but it seems the logical thing if the people posting in the newsgroups were telling the truth.

Of course, long before that there was already was the fact they were going to cable (TNT) and the actors were on the short end of the smaller budget that entailed. I think this was what caused Christian not to extend the contract option earlier on. It also seeded the first of the ill will on her part. Clearly, Straczynski wasn't aware of just how much the actors were giving up until halfway through the specific thread.

Then there's another point that jumps out: JMS says the deadline was very clear, whereas Christian claimed not to be aware of it at all. One of the reasons JMS believed it was completely clear was because he told her so himself at a convention. I'd speculate, though, that she didn't make much of this because she felt that a deadline is something her agent should be contacted about, so she didn't think of it as an official deadline, but as just a line drawn by JMS. She stepped on his toes yet again, and the goodwill was being sucked out of the situation very fast. Straczynski counters by saying that her agent was contacted well in time. Again, if I assume both are speaking the truth, I can only assume that her agent didn't do his job and didn't let her know about this.

Then, Jeff Conaway visited Claudia the Monday after the deadline. Because the deadline had now passed, he was probably very clear about the fact that this was a deadline set by the studio. However, since Christian hadn't heard of it from her agent and hadn't understood that from Straczynski, this was the first time she was really aware of this deadline. That's why she mentioned this as the only time she had been told about the deadline.

There was one more important thing that I can't skip over: Christian doing other work. I don't this is a direct cause for all the trouble that led to her not being in the last season of Babylon 5, but I think it has several tangents with it all the same. From what she wrote, I think Christian was approached for other roles, she hadn't been actively looking for them. It may have been a part of the reason why she didn't give the earlier contract extension. It probably was also the reason why she was looking for a way not to do all episodes. Finally, this was probably also what the rumor mill turned into "her looking around for other work", which was an important thing in the relationships between the different people involved getting strained.

In the end, I think the situation was just not a simple one and there were some problems cropping up, but the one who really dropped the ball was Christian's agent, though. However, I'm just an uninformed kid doing guesswork and making assumptions.

The note I want to end on, is a more positive one. It's the character that filled the void left behind by the lack of Ivanova: Captain Lochley. While one may say this was a Suspiciously Similar Substitute, I personally agree with JMS, she was a different character, had her own story rather than taking over Ivanova's and fit the role to fill quite well. The hard thing here is that in both one-on-one replacements he did, the position in the military structure was a very large of what defined the character, meaning that they would automatically become quite similar.
Anyway, as I was going to say, in a way it is ironic that Christian's replacement only did a few episodes after her departure had at least something to do with her wanting to do less episodes. However, I actually think it was a really good move to have Lochley in so few episodes. Because of this, it didn't feel like she was shoehorned in or that we were being told to care about her, but instead as a natural progression of the situation. As a hole left in the military structure being filled by the folks back home, which wasn't a main cast member, so didn't get the center stage.

3/1/2016: I cleaned up some spelling mistakes and improved some sentences to be clearer, as this was rather poorly written.

Friday, January 11, 2013

VirtualBox: Make your dualboot virtual

This is the first time I make a blogpost like this, but I just managed to pull off exactly what I wanted and because some guessing (both educated guessing and random guessing) was involved I decided to make a post so my experiences could help others in the future.

After I bought my computer, I partitioned off some space on my main disk (the SSD) and installed Ubuntu on it, making my computer a dual boot. However, I continued the tradition that had been standing for years by barely ever booting into it. Now that I wanted to finally start using linux more at home, one of the things I wanted to do was to virtualize both operating systems from the other. Virtualizing Ubuntu from Windows was up first.

Goal: Set up VirtualBox to let me boot the Ubuntu installation on my physical hard disk.
Host System: Windows 7
Client System: Ubuntu 12.04
Processor Manufacturer: AMD (yes, this sort of plays a role)
Special Info: The windows and linux partitions are on the same disk.

Of course, this may be helpful when using different systems, but you may encounter other problems as well as not encounter some of the problems I came across.

Credit where it's due: I scoured the internet for helpful information, but this was the most helpful resource by far: http://cargowire.net/articles/seamlessubuntuwindows

Note up front: sometimes you need to use sudo or su to get administrator access in Ubuntu. I'll leave this for yourself and not mention it in my guide.

Solution:

Done in the past: install Windows and Ubuntu as a dual boot system.

Step 1
We'll start of doing our linux work. In linux, we'll create a VMDK file that specifies the your HD to be used. As such, we install VirtualBox under linux and use the information from the manual to make an image that points to your physical partition with something like this:
-rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 3 
Problem avoided: Windows doesn't give enough permissions for this command on any disk that is being accessed and you can't do anything about that if your OS is on the same disk.

Step 2.
We'll also need to make a boot disk image from linux. We're not going to need it till later, but to avoid unnecessary rebooting we'll do it already. For now we'll just copy the grub list from your Ubuntu installation. This goes like this:
mkdir iso
mkdir -p iso/boot/grub
cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/stage2_eltorito iso/boot/grub
grub-mkrescue -o grub.iso iso
(note: grub-mkrescue complained about missing something. The key was just to take that name and install it with apt-get as it turned out that one of its dependencies was simply not marked as such by the installation package.)

Problem avoided: The virtual system as we're creating it will not be bootable, so we have created an external way to boot into it.

Next we're going to move to Windows (after a short stop in the bios) so the three created files (<name>.vdmk, <name>-pt.vdmk and grub.iso) need to be made available in Windows. I'll leave it up to you decide to do this.

Step 3.
We reboot into the bios. In the bios we turn on AMD Virtualization (AMD-V). This is an extension to the processor instruction set which allows moving the virtualization closer to the hardware.

Problem avoided: We're going to turn on an option that requires AMD-V later. To prevent rebooting all the time this was the best moment to do this.

Step 4.
We continue in windows. Here we place the files we made in linux in a place we like them to do (like %UserProfile%\VirtualBox VMs\ which is the folder VirtualBox will create/use for the VM). Note that we'll keep both VDMKs while the iso is just temporary, so if you want you keep can keep it in a less permanent location.
Next, we need to edit <name>.vdmk. Open it in your favorite text editor and find the line with something like this:
RW 39999488 FLAT "/dev/sda" 168148992
In Windows we refer to disks with a different vocabulary, so we need to change this to something like:
RW 39999488 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive0" 168148992
Problem avoided: We created a linux compatible file for use in Windows, so we needed to turn it into a Windows compatible file. Luckily for us, all we need is such a trivial change.

Step 5.
It's time to make the VM. First we need to install VirtualBox. This needs to be done in Administrator mode, or else we might get denied access later on. So, run the installer as administrator. Don't ask me why they made it so that this was necessary, all I know is that it is. Secondly, we also need to run virtualbox as administrator. Once we're running, we can simply follow the wizard and create our VM and choose to use an existing HD, and then select <name>.vdmk.

Problem avoided: We avoided permission problems here. They show up rather randomly when not installing it as administrator. Running as an administrator usually isn't necessary, but it is here as otherwise Windows won't allow us to access the raw disk.

Step 6.
Open the VM's settings and go to Storage. Here we add a new disk. We create a new vdi of a static size of 10 MB. Make sure everything is connected on the IDE controller. The 10 MB disk should be the primary master, the vdmk we created the primary slave and the optical drive the secundary master.

Problem avoided: We ought to be able to install a bootloader on the disk we made (<name>.vdmk sets you up with <name>-pt.vdmk as the MBR, and all the partitions on the rest of the disk, only allowing access to the ones we specified in step 1)but for some reason grub2 doesn't play nice with this setup, so we created the other disk to install our bootloader on.

Problem avoided: I found that the vdmk we created only worked on an IDE controller, so we had to make sure it wasn't on a SATA-controller.

Problem avoided: We need to make sure that the disk we wanted to boot from is in the correct place in the boot order, and by making it the master and the raw disk the slave we did this. (We could have done this in other ways, but this is the way I chose.)

Step 7.
Still in the settings, go to System and then to Motherboard. There, make sure that IO APIC is used. This is what we needed AMD-V for (with this setting on, the VM can't start unless AMD-V is on).

Problem avoided: The fact that the setting mentions we can't turn it off after installing the OS is a good hint as to why we need it. Apparently this functionality is used during normal installation of OS. (Yes, I sort of randomly stumbled upon this solution myself...)

Step 8
Still in the settings go back to Storage and mount grub.iso. Now we can close settings and start the VM. It should start the bootloader from the cd. Then, it should start Ubuntu without any further problems. In Ubuntu we can now install grub to the 10 MB disk with something like this:
grub-install /dev/sda
You can now eject the cd and reboot the VM and start it autonomously. Then you might want to do some customizing to remove the Windows installation from the grub list.

Final note: I do believe that due to the way this works when you install something like a new kernel image which should run grub-install anew, this will only happen for the current way you are booted into the OS. I don't believe this could have been avoided by not making the boot hard disk and using the cd permanently, because then it would just mean that if booted into it through the VM it wouldn't update anything (that is used) at all. In the end, you will just have to update grub manually...