Finding Damo

The story of a man, his job, two cats and the meaning of success.

Archive for the category “rant”

12 Jul 2014
1 Comment

Cosplay Hate

This all started with a conversation on Facebook:

Names Feegled out to protect the innocent.

Names Feegled out to protect the innocent.

The conversation started at around 10pm and my brain wasn’t up to the challenge of mounting a suitable defense. So I left it. Away on holidays in the Grampians, I finally got the strength together to write this. I know I’m not holding a popular position (or at least, not one that people are happy to state out loud), but I do believe I’m write. So here goes.

A couple of years ago, I took the family to Supanova. They hadn’t been to a convention before. I was catching up with my Discworld convention committee.

We marveled at the costumes. My favourites were a pair of Doctor Whos (Four and Seven), a wookie in a hockey jersey, some steampunk Ghostbusters and a lovely pair of Poison Ivys. And that was only a smattering.

supanova

When we stopped for lunch, I started people watching in earnest.

And now I’m going to join in on an Internet controversy with the statement I made to my wife on that day:

People need to wear costumes based on their body type.

Wait! Don’t run off! There are caveats. There are reasons. There are exemptions. There are excuses. But yeah, I’m coming down on the Dark Side (with cookies).

When you are dedicated to worlds other than this one, and show your dedication by letting your imagination run wild and your inner child free, the mainstream is going to stop and, not getting it, judge. So we find ourselves making excuses:

“I get so little time to relax. This is a way for me to be myself.”

“Getting into costume is a way to further immerse myself in a world I love. It’s almost like getting into the book.”

We don’t need to make excuses. Most of the people I know have no fear of what the “real world” things of us.

And even that’s ok. It’s fine. To paraphrase: Wear what you wanna wear, be what you wanna be yeah-eh-eh.

“I love Buffy, so I’m going to the con dressed as Buffy.” So what if he is a 200kg body builder with more hair on his body than Sarah Michelle Gellar has on her head?

And I swear, I Truly believe that statement, no matter how much flak I’m going to get over this post. If he wants to wear a Buffy cheerleader skirt and carry a stake, that’s fine.

As long as he knows that he is a 200kg, hairy-backed body builder; that dressing as Buffy is a patently ridiculous act and that he’s making a statement, or simply having fun with the character, fine. Joss has done worse to Buffy himself. Be Buffy. I salute you. I will laugh alongside you and be happy. But if I’m laughing at you, you’re wearing the wrong costume.

me as supermanI wouldn’t dress as superman. Or rather, I would dress as Superman, but I would be a Superman who has really let himself go. I’d have vindaloo stains on my S and a doughnut in one hand with little Kryptonite sprinkles.

And that would be OK.

If, on the other hand, I decided to be Superman, and dressed as Superman, in the tights and stretchy suit, because I LOVE Superman and want to show the world my love for Superman –

– Then I have failed. You don’t honour Superman by being a poor imitation of Superman. You can honour Superman by parodying him, by being playful with a beloved character. But I don’t believe you can love Superman by being him when you’re clearly not him.

Rant. Rave. Get it over with. Now read on. I’m giddy with the power of free speech. I feel like Andrew Bolt. Without the racism.

There is a movement on various Social Networks to call out cosplayers who dress inappropriately and make fun of them. They search for photos of cosplayers that they judge to be ridiculous and post the photos so that people can laugh at them.

This is reprehensible. These people should be dressed as My Little Ponies and dropped off at a biker bar.

I don’t believe that anyone should be attacked for their body shape, age, gender or colour. And I’m not going to attack anyone. I celebrate and truly enjoy diversity in cosplay. There is an infinite universe that can be realized through our imaginations. The key word here is

IMAGINATION

I’m blessed in that all of my cosplaying companions have overactive imaginations. I’ve never seen anyone I know dress in anything less than a marvelous outfit. And these costumes range from a certain combination of regular clothing to an orangutan suit and beyond. Money isn’t a factor. Size or shape isn’t an issue. The success or failure of a costume comes from the amount of imagination and dedication that goes into a project (and many many energy drinks the night before).

The people who don’t have any imagination shouldn’t be ridiculed either. And I’m sure they don’t want my pity. Or to know that I’m aiming my pity at them. And, to be honest, I’m probably not pitying them. So that’s OK.

But they need friends who, before they choose a costume, can suggest:

“Hey, I’m pretty sure we can paint you up like a Binar. That would suit you perfectly.” Or “You’d make a brilliant Doctor. Let’s get you a sonic screwdriver.” Or “If I stick a shiny H on your head, you could be a Hologram on Red Dwarf.”

This is my point. Not “You can’t be Superman” (although I’m pretty much saying that, in the case of Superman) but that, with a little imagination, anyone can create a costume that suits them, is clever, worthy of praise and raises the bar of cosplay.

When did cosplay become a word? Dressing up. Fancy dress. Anyway.

  • Be a wookie in a hockey jersey.
  • Be a steampunk Ghostbuster
  • Be the Doctor.

But maybe rethink the Robin Hood outfit.

Damian as Robin Hood

I don’t always follow my own advice.

Posted in Costumes, rant and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
24 May 2014
3 Comments

Let’s Kill Hitler

rory punches hitlerEvery time someone brings up time travel, someone mentions killing Hitler.

“If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?”

It’s either kill him as a baby or kill him as an adult. As a baby he hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Plus, killing babies is less than savoury for most people (whereas killing adults seems to be totally fine). As an adult, he may have already done too much damage to stop by just removing him from the equation.

EDIT: After being linked this by three different people on three different social networks, I thought I’d better add this in:

To properly answer the question, you first need a Year 9 Humanities class brief history of Adolf. Here are some excerpts from one of my students from last  year:

“Adolf Hitler was born from Klara Polzl and Alois Hitler on the 20th of April, 1889 in a small town in Austria named Braunau, and is most commonly known for being Germany’s leader during World War 2. Hitler was the fourth child Klara had given birth to, as the three before had died. Hitler had a younger sister named Paula. “

“Alois was a strict senior customs official who took beatings upon his wife and even his son. After Hitler read that the brave man gives no sign of being in pain, Hitler told his mother: “father hit me thirty-two times… and I did not cry”. Klara, Adolf’s mother, was a very kind woman who only wanted Adolf to succeed and do well in life, as she did not want to lose another child.”

“While Hitler disliked most of his teachers, he had one which he paid respect to, which was Leopold Potsch, his history teacher. Potsch, being a German Nationalist, taught Hitler and his pupils about Germany’s victory over France. Hitler was inspired by Potsch in the long run to be a Nationalist.”

“Throughout his life, he had consistent bad grades with the exception of his skill in art. When his entry to an art school was declined, he was shattered, and lived in Vienna pretending to be an art student trying to make his mother proud. While he lived in Vienna, he mostly walked parks, observed buildings, and visited libraries. In the summer of 1909, Hitler lived on the streets.”

Caught up? Good. By 1925 it was pretty much too late. He’d written Mein Kampf, been to prison and had a following of people that would probably have continued with the reich even if Hitler was out of the picture.

So any killing of Hitler needs to be done before then, probably around 1909 when he was living on the streets.

Right?

Bloodthirsty bastards! Why do we have to kill Hitler? Why bloody our own souls? Here’s an alternative that doesn’t come up very often: Be nice to Hitler.

Let me present you with a scenario: Someone is coming back to kill you from the future. In about five years’ time you will do something that will cause the death of billions of people. With the invention of time travel, all of this death can be avoided simply by killing you. Are you ok with that? Or would you like to see someone try an alternative option first?

SARAH CONNOR HITLERWow. Hitler is sort of like Sarah Connor.

Anyway.

Hitler hated his teachers. He was bored at school. He was excluded from art college, he was beaten by his father. He was lazy but intelligent. He only had one testicle.

I can’t do anything about the last one, but as a time traveller, especially if we can travel about willy-nilly to do what we want, we could negate a number of bad influences in his life, making him, if not a good person, at least one who is politically ambivalent, not disposed to prejudices towards certain races and safe out of the way in an artist’s colony somewhere.

Here’s the plan:

  • Ditching Alois – the father, were you not paying attention? – by causing a bar fight between him and a burly psychopath in a pub somewhere. The man drank a lot. He also looked after bees. Strange.
  • Work at his high school, being a mentor to the young Hitler and giving him challenging books about being nice to people. Let’s get this Potsch teacher fired as well.
  • Bribe someone at the arts school to get him accepted. A Hitler making a living at art is not a Hitler trying to take over the country.
  • Finally, get someone to hire him, somewhere well out of Berlin.
  • Oh, and every time he tries to grow a moustache, shave it in his sleep.

Voila! No more evil dictator.

If I wanted to go further, I’d be talking to the leaders of France and England and suggesting that if they don’t want a second world war, they should go a bit easier on the country they just defeated. If they hadn’t been so heavy-handed in their sanctions, German Nationalism wouldn’t have received so much support from the general populous.

Of course, maybe people have been trying this for decades. Changing time and each time getting someone worse, until last time, when the time traveller stopped the evil dictator Gordon Champott, who had destroyed most of the civilised world from his seat in England, and when he got back, found that Hitler had risen to power in his stead.

And maybe a world war at this point in time, before the rise of nuclear weapons, was better for the planet as a whole.

But seriously, if someone gives you a time machine, just think about your actions before you go and murder someone, just to see what happens.

I would be incredibly irresponsible in this.

I would be incredibly irresponsible in this.

Posted in rant, Teaching and tagged , , , , , , , ,
24 Apr 2014

Hair

“You look nice today,” my wife said a couple of days ago. She looked at me. “I think it’s the beard.”

bearded damo

How’s this look?

In other news, Madonna posted a photo on Instagram that briefly broke the Internet:

Madonna's armpit

Women everywhere jumped to Madonna’s defence. Anyone who made a negative comment was instantly branded as being sexist.

“A woman’s body is her own. She can do anything with it that she likes, you sexist beast!”

This is true. But having a preference isn’t sexist.

My wife likes me in a beard. She prefers me with a beard. She thinks I look better with a beard. Other girlfriends have hated the beard. The beard must go. They would never date anyone with facial hair. Or chest hair. Or back hair. And no, I’m not posting photos of that.

Not to mention this look:

bald damo

serial killer?

I was having a very positive online dating experience with a girl. We’d emailed back and forth for a few weeks and were ready to meet up for the first time. And a couple of days beforehand I did Shave for a Cure.

She almost had a heart attack when she met me. She was very attracted by the hair that I had. Less attracted by the weird bald creature that turned up to our first meeting.

It is completely ok to have a preference for the hairy or hairless look. If you choose to have leg hair or underarm hair, wear it proudly. But people will judge you. If  you grow a beard or shave your head, that’s fine. But people will judge you.

You can’t call someone sexist for having a preference. If you call them out on their preference and they tell you “Oh, they look like a man” or “it makes them look less feminine” or “women need to keep themselves nice for us men” then you may slap them with something heavy.

I alternate between bearded and shaven for various reasons. Movember is one. Winter is another. I’ll shave my beard again soon for the production I’m doing up in Emerald. Sometimes I shave or grow a beard for a costume. Sometimes I just want a change. But I’ll admit that I have a beard more often than not now, because my wife likes it.

Posted in Costumes, rant, Reflection, Relationships and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment
13 May 2013

Lock ’em up.

Before I begin I need to reiterate to any new Damo Finders that I very rarely do research before I rant. This blog does not contain scholarly rigour and I freely admit that pretty much anything I write here could be completely untrue.

You have been warned.

teenager in prisonOnce again, I’ve returned from coaching a debating evening filled with the half-formed thoughts of Year 9 students. This time, they were asked to argue “That children should not be incarcerated”. From what I could gather, they were arguing that children (legally, those under the age of 18) should not be held in detention, put in prison, taken to juvie, or the like. It was a challenging topic, especially for our side, who were trying to convince the audience that even a murderer would benefit more from a kind word and some therapy than a stint in the pokie.

Their arguments were that children’s minds are not fully formed before the age of 18 and that they cannot distinguish between right and wrong, and therefore cannot be held accountable for their actions and should not be punished for them. That placing children into institutions puts them in contact with other criminal types, increasing the risk that they will become hardened criminals through association.

The negative team’s best argument was that if the Victorian Police are willing to give a 12 year old a gun license, they must be pretty damn sure that the child knows the difference between right and wrong. They also felt that the greater good of society needed to be taken into account and that a murdering child needed to be removed from society for the good of society.

Good arguments. What do I think?

It is completely possible for a child to be a psychopath. A child doesn’t turn eighteen and then lose the ability to empathise with others. As far as I know, psychopaths are born, not made. There are children that are, if not evil, then at least completely amoral. They either can’t tell the difference between right and wrong, or they know and don’t believe that such distinctions apply to them.

If a child kills or assaults someone, not through an accident or loss of control, but through careful planning and forethought, that child can’t be allowed to continue to exist in society. Who knows? Maybe they can be “cured” or “rehabilitated” through intensive therapy. Maybe not. But until they are judged fit to coexist in society, they are requested to leave the pool. Play time’s over.

James BulgerThose are the extreme cases. Remember James Bulger? Jon Venables and Robert

Thompson – both ten – stole the two year old from a shopping centre. They walked him around town, beat him and kicked him, and then killed him and left him on the train tracks.

Did you know they moved them to Australia? Gave them new identities and gave them to us.

One of the important concepts highlighted in this case is that of “Doli incapax”. Legally there is a stage that a child can be held responsible for their actions. That they understand the concepts of right and wrong, and that death is a permanent state. Back in the early nineties, once it had been judged that the boys understood that death was permanent, they could be tried as adults. I’m pretty sure that’s no longer the case.

Either way, the argument is for or against putting children into detention. I say yes, for murderers and insane evil little Chucky clones (ever see The Good Son?) but no to those who commit crimes against property.

Sticking a child in detention that has been done for shoplifting or similar is like creating a master class for junior thieves. You can find out all sorts of nifty tricks when you hang out with other people with a similar mind frame.

“I’ll swap you some breaking and entering skills for some tips on pickpocketing.”

More to the point, incarceration creates an institutionalised child. It’s not a natural society. The pecking order is similar to prison. The concepts of helping out a fellow inmate or being kind are beaten or terrified out of the child and they learn that being stronger than the next person is the way to be. How is that going to help them in the real world?

Some would say it’s a perfect lesson. I say it’s the top of a slippery slope to hell.

I deal with teenagers every day. Only once in a blue moon do I have to deal with a child around whom I am genuinely uneasy. There is good in almost every child. But there is always the exception to the rule.

I’ve seen a student who was the most surly, angry boy in the school smile with genuine appreciation when I told him his work was good. I can’t say that his attitude changed that much, but his mother told me during parent/teacher interviews that he really liked my class and talked about it a lot at home.

lord of the fliesChildhood in general is like Lord of the Flies. The power plays and shifting alliances are complex and endless. Teenagers are in constant fear of being embarrassed, of breaking an unwritten rule, of being ostracised or excluded. The rules are many and you often only find out you’ve broken one after it’s too late. And everything is done under the shadow of the authority figures in their lives.

We can only be the best role models we can be. We can listen and give advice. We can point them in the right direction and hope that something sticks. And we can fire up their imaginations so that they have more productive ways to exhaust their energies.

But if they’re out there killing people, then hell yeah, lock ’em up.

Rant over. Lighter topics next week.

Posted in Celebrity, Death, rant, Reflection, Social justice and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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