Pixel Scroll 6/26/17 Tyme Scrollfari, Inc. Scrollfaris Tu Any Pixel En The Fyle

(1) OFF THE TOP OF HER HEAD. In “Nattering Social Justice Cook: Celebrating Rainbow Hair”, Cat Rambo delves into the history and symbolism of the hairstyle.

A common adjective in many of the more conservative, alt-right, and other theater-of-outrage rants I’ve seen in the past couple of years is “rainbow-haired,” never in a positive sense. It’s usually paired with some form of “social justice warrior,” and often accompanied by an emotional catch-phrase or verbiage like “feels” or “drinking the tears.” There’s a lot of interesting stuff built into that particular fixation. So let’s dig around to find what’s contained in the phrase and its use in this pejorative sense….

Rainbow hair is grounded in a counter-cultural movement. It celebrates individuality and a certain DIY spirit (there is no shame in going to the salon for it, but I find it much more fun to do my own). It celebrates one’s appearance, draws the eye rather than shrinking away from it. It is something beautiful that those who don’t fit inside normal standards of beauty can have. It is playful, joyful, delightful at times.

Very recently it has spread like wildfire, and many of the people adopting it are millennials. This gives the anti-rainbow hair sentiment a double-whammy, providing an “oh these kids nowadays” moment while slamming anyone older for acting overly young. (Which implies that’s a bad thing, which isn’t a notion I agree with).

Here’s something that I think often makes conservative minds bristle: it confuses gender norms. In traditional thinking, men aren’t supposed to care about or celebrate their appearance in the way women are. But rainbow hair appears all over the gender spectrum. Pull in the strand of meaning associated with gay pride, and the objectionability quotient increases.

There’s a reason alt-right and other manifestations of conservative trollish rhetoric so often focuses on appearance, on fat-shaming or fuckability or even how a new Ken-doll wears their hair. It’s a reversion to the schoolyard insult, the way insecure children will be cruel to others in order to try to build their internal self-worth, a behavior many, but sadly not all, outgrow. Worthy of an essay in itself is the fact that it’s also behavior advantageous to advertisers: anxious consumers who want to fit in are willing to spend money in the effort.

(2) TURNOVER AT MAD. ComicsBeat knows the name of the next bullgoose loony: “Dept. of Funny Business: Bill Morrison is named new Executive Editor of Mad Magazine” .

Ending a suspenseful watch that lasted a few months, the white smoke has finally risen from DC Entertainment, signaling the election of a new pope of humor: Bill Morrison will be the new executive editor of Mad Magazine when it moves westward later this year.

…Well, every irreplaceable person seems irreplaceable until you find someone who will do the job differently but as well, and so it is with Morrison, an animation and comic veteran who has worked with the Bongo Comics line of Simpson Comics and many other hilarious things for years. He’s a great cartoonist himself and knows the score up and down and inside out.

(3) DORTMUND DOCKET. Detailed panel notes are the highlight of Tomas Cronholm’s report about “U-Con, Eurocon 2017”.

This was a fairly small Eurocon, with 375 attending members. The venue was some kind of school, with a big hall suitable for the main programme and some smaller rooms, a bar and a dealers’ area. Perfect for the size of the convention. Here are some reports from the programme items

(4) SPACE RELIC CONSERVATION. The Apollo XI spacecraft goes on the road: “Moonwalkers’ Apollo 11 Capsule Gets Needed Primping For Its Star Turn On Earth”

Until recently, the capsule sat in the main lobby of the National Air and Space Museum, where it had been since the museum opened in 1976. Conservator Lisa Young says that occasionally workers would open up its Plexiglas case to look it over or put in new lighting.

“But it never really went under a full examination or investigative analysis as to all of the certain materials on there, how stable they are,” says Young, who is working on the spacecraft now in a restoration hangar at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., outside of Washington, D.C.

“Our big job as conservators right now is to figure out, if we are going to put it back on display permanently, what could be happening to it in 50 years,” says Young, who wants to prevent future deterioration.

(5) SKYFULL. SpaceX non-fiction double feature: “SpaceX completes launch and landing double bill”

Late on Friday, [SpaceX] used one of its refurbished Falcon 9 vehicles to put up a Bulgarian satellite from Florida.

Then on Sunday, SpaceX lofted another 10 spacecraft for telecommunications company Iridium. This time, the rocket flew out of California.

Both missions saw the Falcon first-stages come back to Earth under control to drone ships that had been positioned out on the ocean.

(6) AUTHORIAL PALETTE. There’s an overview of Ben Blatt’s research in this PRI article: “A journalist uses statistics to uncover authors’ ‘cinnamon words'”.

In the book, Blatt refers to these patterns as an author’s “stylistic fingerprint.” In one line of inquiry, he dusts for prints by calculating famous authors’ favorite words — the terms they use “at an extreme ratio” compared to other writers. He calls them “cinnamon words,” after an anecdote about the novelist Ray Bradbury.

“The motivation for looking at this was, I had read this book that just asked authors their favorite words, and Ray Bradbury said, ‘My favorite word is cinnamon because it reminds me of my grandmother’s pantry,’” Blatt says.

Sure enough, Bradbury’s fans can find the word cinnamon sprinkled throughout his writing, from descriptions of dusty roads and red-brown hills to the dark Egyptian tomb that “breathed out a sick exhalation of paprika, cinnamon and powdered camel dung.”

“So, he’s using it all the time,” Blatt says. “And building on that, I wanted to look at hundreds of other authors to see, were there other similar words that were jumping out of a writer’s inner voice.”

(7) FLUXBUN WARNING. The new PhotonFlux bar in Wellington, New Zealand will celebrate World UFO Day on July 2.

Years in the making Anton and Nina imaged what the future would be like. Will it be a post-apocalyptic survival or, a future where everybody wears the same thing and live in peace with robots in a bubble city.

Either way we want to take photos of it, gather evidence and travel there.

Photonflux is the place where possible future will be planned, discussed and changed.

The headquarters offers the revolutionary fluxbun, a fried dough filled with various flavours in a casual setting. For World UFO Day your filling will be in the hands of our creative chef.

However if you do not wish to be pleasantly surprised you can pick from our menu.

Chris Barlow gave it a thumbs up review on Google Plus.

One of a kind, a sci-fi themed bar in Wellington! Like stepping into another dimension – as you enter you’re immediately surrounded by eye-popping visuals straight out of the film set. Delicious “Flux buns” are teleported care of the in-house “galactic food truck”, complemented by an eclectic range of tap beer. A must see in Wellington.

(8) TRIVIAL TRIVIA

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once hosted a reception for time travelers — but only advertised the event after it had ended. [Source: Huffington Post.]

(9) TODAY’S ANNIVERSARY BOOK

(10) LATE ADOPTER. In honor of the anniversary, John Scalzi tells how he found his way to Platform 9-3/4: “Harry Potter and the Initially Dismissive But Ultimately Appreciative Fan”.

But as it turns out neither Harry Potter nor J.K. Rowling were done with me. First, of course, it turned out that Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley (and Rowling) weren’t Tears for Fears; they were the Beatles. And like the Beatles they weren’t just popular. They materially changed common culture — for a start, because they also changed the industry that they came out of, and the work of everyone in their field, who either responded to them or were influenced by them. Now, one may, like me, decide a phenomenon like that isn’t for you, but when literally(!) the world is changing to deal with and make room for that phenomenon, you still have to acknowledge that it’s there and work with it, or at least around it. Particularly when and if, like me, it comes out of the fields (in this case publishing and writing) you hope to be in, and in my case were eventually part of.

Second, I found another way in to Rowling’s wizarding world: through the movies, which were for me in a way that I, from that snippet of the second book, assumed the books were not. In retrospect this is not at all surprising — I was a professional film critic for several years, and I’ve written two books on film, and, as anyone who has ever read my novels can tell you, the storytelling structure of film is a huge influence on my storytelling in prose. My professional and creative interest in film helped that version of Harry Potter’s story speak to me.

(11) CIRCULAR REASONING SQUAD. In a post densely filled with animated GIFs, Sarah A. Hoyt responds to her critics on the right and what they had to say about her recent Sad Puppies-themed post for Mad Genius Club.

I did not feel guilty about a) not turning over Sad Puppies to someone else. Sad Puppies was Larry’s, then Brad’s, then Kate’s, and is now mine and next year will be mostly Amanda’s. We were in it from the beginning, and we have decided long ago that it would stay within the cabal, because none of us — all of us public figures to a degree or another — can afford to have something associated with our name taken down a crazy road without us having control over it. b) Not putting up a list for the Hugos — I was never going to put up a list. And I feel queasy about encouraging people to vote for an award that has been so thoroughly tainted. c) Not putting up a list for the Dragon. The Dragon is bigger than any of us. Some small names got in last year, but they were just because it was the first time. Right now I’m not big enough for the dragons, and I doubt any who covet it are either. d) I thought it was time to get out from between the fight of the Volksdeutshe expatriate and the guardians of chorfdom…

And she addresses specific criticisms about her latest Mad Genius Club post by saying she doesn’t understand why they’re down on her.

So, imagine my surprise when my post immediately attracted two commenters yelling at me for… well… actually I have no idea because most of it makes no sense. You guys can see the comments yourselves. There’s something about me looking down on people who don’t use the right oyster fork. You guys know my background and my question on this is… there’s a FORK? FOR OYSTERS? Why?

The other one apparently had something about me slandering other puppy-descended movements, which frankly… was news to me. First slander doesn’t mean what they think it means. Second, I’m fairly sure to slander them I’d have to mention them, and I don’t recall I have, except for Superversive, for whose anthology, Forbidden thoughts I wrote a short story. (It was as a press of that name needs to make it a rather more on-the-nose anthology than I’d have made it, but the point is I wasn’t the editor, the stories weren’t mine to choose, and it would be a funny world if my aesthetics were the only ones that counted, right? So, saying they have different tastes from me doesn’t count as a slander, right? particularly when I still wrote for them. Either that or I don’t know what slander means. Maybe I slandered them BY writing for them? I’m SOOOOOOO confused.)

(12) UNFRIENDLY FIRE. In addition to the comments there, Hoyt’s Mad Genius Club post about Sad Puppies also attracted some large bore artillery fire from Russell Newquist, “This Is What A Complete Leadership Failure Looks Like”, for the inactivity of SP5 in general, and her chastising Declan Finn for trying to jumpstart it last January.

Sarah Hoyt’s leadership of the Sad Puppies V campaign is a classic case study in leadership failure. If you ever want the absolute pitch perfect example of what not to do in a leadership position, look no further. This tale has everything: incompetence, insanity, bullying, harassment, technical difficulties, lack of vision, and just plain bitchiness. If I tried to create an example of bad leadership from scratch, I couldn’t make one this complete. If she were trying to destroy the Sad Puppies campaign and help the other side, she couldn’t have done a better job of it.

This, my friends, is a tail of abject, utter fail.

Sad Puppies V (SPV from here out) failed in literally every conceivable way, so this may take a bit. Bear with me….

(13) POLITICAL AUTOPSY. I spotted the Hoyt and Newquist links above in Camestros Felapton’s post “Sad Popcorn” where he tries to make sense of it all. If that’s possible.

(14) D&D HISTORY. Cecilia D’Anastasio tells Kotaku readers “Dungeons & Dragons Wouldn’t Be What It Is Today Without These Women”, though her very first illustration seems strangely out of synch with the rest of her case:

Almost every copy of the first Dungeons & Dragons adventure written by a woman is buried in a landfill in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Those copies, published in 1980, were the masterwork of a game designer named Jean Wells, who worked for D&D’s first publisher, TSR. Wells designed Palace of the Silver Princess to her tastes, and with no regard for TSR’s mandate to make the game more kid-friendly. At one point in the module, players encounter a beautiful young woman hanging from the ceiling, naked, by her own hair. “Nine ugly men can be seen poking their swords lightly into her flesh, all the while taunting her in an unknown language,” the module reads. In-game, this scene turns out to be a simple magical illusion—but the accompanying illustration included in the module that TSR shipped to hobby shops nationally was not.

“A little bit of bondage here, a little torture there, worked its way into the Palace of the Silver Princess module,” Stephen Sullivan, a close friend of Wells and the adventure’s editor, told me. After it was properly reviewed—post-production—TSR’s executives went ballistic. Seventy-two hours after Palace of the Silver Princess was released, it was retracted.

“It was what Jean wanted it to be,” Sullivan said of the module. (Wells passed away in 2012.) “It was her baby. And for another place and another time, it probably would have been just perfect,” Sullivan said. Those retracted modules, now dubbed the “orange versions,” are buried somewhere under Lake Geneva’s flat, Midwestern landscape. It was soon rewritten by D&D designer Tom Moldvay and redistributed with Wells’ name relegated to the second credit.

(15) TOP NOVELS. Edmonton’s Hugo Award Book Club has been burning the midnight oil: here’s their discussion of two more nominees.

Second-Book Syndrome

Perhaps the book suffers from being the second in a trilogy. As such, it can’t have the originality and vigor of a first book and also can’t have as epic a conclusion as a third book.

Jemisin’s strength as a writer and deft social commentary make this a worthwhile read. Questions of race, class and gender are explored thoughtfully and with nuance. The characters speak with their own voices, and grow.

Alabaster’s slow decline as he tries to pass along knowledge to Essun, and Essun’s growing control of her magic could have been nothing more than a Hero’s Journey ™ like that of Obi-Wan and Luke. But Jemisin’s more nuanced character building elevates this relationship to something more touching and poignant.  Again, she raises the readers’ expectations as they progress through the book.

 The End Is Nigh Again

One of the recurring themes in “big” science fiction is the impending end of the world. In Death’s End, the end of the world is nigh on no fewer than six occasions, only to be averted suddenly through deux et machina each time.  The frequency of these calamities within the book, and how precipitously they are forgotten devalues them, and left our book group struggling to care.

The character of Cheng Xin is one of the weakest parts of the book, as none of us were really able to understand her motivations or her personality. She’s faced with conflict after conflict throughout the book, and presented with a wide variety of moral dilemmas, but through it all she remains a cypher.

In the previous two books the author wrote from several points of view other than the main character.

Death’s End focuses almost solely on Cheng Xin, with just a brief portion from Tianming’s perspective. This leaves other interesting characters — like Luo Ji and Wade — on the sidelines. The omission of their perspectives is a missed opportunity that points to the lack of depth in the book.

(16) HUGO QUIP. No reviews in this post this post by Camestros Felapton, but there’s a lively bon mot:

Best Series – the category that somehow manages to combine elements of both the protestant work ethic and Catholic guilt in one package.

(17) DARK TOWER. A new featurette from The Dark Tower – The Legacy of the Gunslinger.

There are other worlds than these. Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, the ambitious and expansive story from one of the world’s most celebrated authors, makes its launch to the big screen. The last Gunslinger, Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), has been locked in an eternal battle with Walter O’Dim, also known as the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey), determined to prevent him from toppling the Dark Tower, which holds the universe together. With the fate of the worlds at stake, good and evil will collide in the ultimate battle as only Roland can defend the Tower from the Man in Black.

 

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Greg Hullender, Nigel, Cat Rambo, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]

97 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/26/17 Tyme Scrollfari, Inc. Scrollfaris Tu Any Pixel En The Fyle

  1. It was not so much of “lack of leadership” but more “lack of goal”. What was it again, they were trying to achieve?

    This is one of the problems with groups that are unified mostly by what they hate and not what they love. Many of the Pups were only working together because doing so would somehow screw over the people they hated – even as far back as LC’s original SP campaign, which was predicated in large part on getting people’s “heads to explode”.

    The problem is, being against something only works when you are in the fray. Once you have to stop and figure out what goal you are moving towards, then the factions emerge, as different groups allied together for different reasons. Sure, they were all against that one thing, but they all wanted different things. That’s one reason it is so hard to pin down what the Pups want – because so many of them want different things from the others.

    And the real lesson here is that when you have as movement that is based on hating other people, sooner or later the members of that movement will start hating one another. The Pups are, by and large, seething and angry people. Once it became clear to them that some of their “fellow travelers” had a different destination in mind from the one they had, it was inevitable that they would begin hating one another.

  2. @rcade

    I feel like this project has the potential to be announced and undelivered so long it should be called the Last Dangerous Puppies.

    En Attendant Alpo ?

  3. @Oneiros

    I hope there’s an Elevenfox in the future

    Followed by a movie adaptation: Ocean’s Elevenfox

  4. @Aaron

    That’s one reason it is so hard to pin down what the Pups want – because so many of them want different things from the others.

    Hence the revisionist history about their ‘success in exposing the collusion at the Hugos’. The only thing that lets them hang together is the false idea that they won something. They boost how they showed the world that the Hugos were actually controlled by… the members of Worldcon and not every SFF fan in the world! There big victory was exposing something that every person with even the slightest clue about the Hugos knew, was openly pointed out and in every notice, FAQ and discussion since the late 40s.

    They also have lost their opponents in the culture wars. While they’ve been tripping over themselves to declare victor, the mass of the fans have simply refused to reward them for a tainted process and worked on changing the rules to reflect that people can’t be trusted to follow a social norm out of respect for the community. So they didn’t get the Hugos, they didn’t expose this hidden realm of excellent SFF that the public has been aching for but the evil SJWs keep hidden and they never got their smoking gun that Tor and John Scalzi decide who wins every year. Their entire impact was simply to be shitty and rude enough that rules needed to be enacted where common decency and mutual respect had been enough up to then.

    That’s really LC and his Sad Puppies’ campaign’s legacy with the Hugos. Being awful people to the point that rules not allowing people to be awful were required. Bravo Puppies! Bravo.

  5. Re: The Emcannibaling

    As one of the resident linguists, I feel compelled to (pedantically) point out that the phonological rules of English (or rather, in this case, the inherited phonological rules of Latin) only allow the prefix “en-” to assimilate labially when followed by a labial consonant. You could have “en+puppiment” become “empuppiment” but you cannot, no way, no how, have “en+cannibaling” become “emcannibaling”.

    Technically, when followed by a velar consonant, as in this case, you have velar assimilation to [ng] but this is not reflected in the written form.

    Just had to get that off my chest.

  6. Disenchestment?

    (Not sure whether the -en- applies to something sitting on the chest. Better than -in-, I suppose.)

  7. Cynic that I am, I can’t help but draw a connection between Hoyt getting GIF happy and Facebook’s feature for finding GIFs becoming more visible…

  8. You can see those pixels in any magazine
    But what’s the use of scrolling when you don’t know what they mean?

    Deadspin has been running stories about a wrestler in the Appalachian Mountain Wrestling promotion who bills himself as the “Progressive Liberal.” So far I haven’t heard of him bringing his SJW Credentials to a match. (ETA: Not that I’d recommend that given the average wrestling crowd. Maybe he could provide video proof.)

  9. Jack Lint – I read the article, as a fan of pro-wrestling it’s interesting to see how the modern political landscape affects gimmicks, there were a surprising amount of indie heel ‘Make X Great Again’ gimmicks. A pro-Trump pro-wrestler named Sam Adonis got heat in Mexico using a pro-Trump gimmick where he comes out with the Don’s face on an American flag.

    Maybe some of the alt-marketing trolling techniques are thinking life is like pro-wrestling and getting a crowd worked up is a way to get over?

    Just as a side note GLOW on Netflix is awesome and isn’t far off what the real promotion was like.

    And off topic I’m taking inspiration from James Davis Nicholls lists to go through the
    20 core video games I think that every SFF fan should know of. But it got into the thousands of words so it’ll be a thing over a couple of days.

  10. I like the wrestling analogy: was the whole Kerfuffle really one side turning up for pro-wrestling and then finding the rules of the game was a debating club?

  11. ‘Followed by a movie adaptation: Ocean’s Elevenfox’

    Looking forward to the prequel The Hateful Eightfox.

  12. Heather Rose Jones on June 27, 2017 at 11:52 am said:

    As one of the resident linguists, I feel compelled to (pedantically) point out that the phonological rules of English (or rather, in this case, the inherited phonological rules of Latin) only allow the prefix “en-” to assimilate labially when followed by a labial consonant.

    Guideline, not rule. Other things being equal, yes, that’s what you would expect, but exceptions can happen when, for example, a violation of the “rule” contains sufficient humor value and/or is promoted by a popular source.

    Despite what Mike might like to think, I doubt that File770 is a sufficiently advanced popular source, but if the right people see it here and promote it further, it could catch on and eventually grow up to become a real word. Extremely unlikely, but in no way impossible, despite the fact that it violates standard patterns of coinage.

    It might be a start if someone managed to pass it on to GRRM, and he in turn managed to persuade someone to use it in GoT….

    (Note, I’m not suggesting that anyone go annoy GRRM with our silliness. Even if he were amused by it, I doubt he’d be amused enough to try to get it into GoT. I’m not proposing a plausible scenario here–merely pointing out a remotely possible one.)

  13. ‘Looking forward to the prequel The Hateful Eightfox.’

    And then there’s Sevenfox Samurai.

    Which is not a pre-prequel, as one might think by applying conventional math to the name, but is instead a sequel with some highly exotic math.

  14. ElevenFox: V guvax zbfg bs hf ner va snibe bs bireguebjvat gur Urknepungr (erzrzore, gurl ryvzvangrq gurve ragver zbeny pnfgr), naq rfcrpvnyyl Xry Pbzznaq. V’q cebonoyl frggyr sbe whfg Xry Pbzznaq tbvat qbja.

    (sad trombones myself about Standlee signal)

    @Nancy Sauer: To me, oddly colored hair is “eh, meh, whatevs.” Not quite your attitude, but it’s not shocking. I probably see it more on middle-aged women than young ones — possibly for the same reason as @robinareid — no bleach needed.

    Changes in the Hugo rules are easily explained:
    The Puppies weren’t house-trained

    The people who actually belong to and care about Worldcon/the Hugos didn’t need explicit rules not to be assholes.

    @microtherion: Euge!

    The Nine Billion Names of Fox.

  15. Heather Rose Jones: As one of the resident linguists, I feel compelled to (pedantically) point out…

    I’m aware of that. It’s a play on
    Sad Puppies 4: The Embiggening

    … a name choice which, in hindsight, just makes the Puppies look even more sad and pathetic.

  16. @JJ

    It’s a play on
    Sad Puppies 4: The Embiggening

    … a name choice which, in hindsight, just makes the Puppies look even more sad and pathetic.

    It is a sad truth that when anyone on the Internet offers to make your dog bigger, it’s always a hoax.

  17. Greg Hullender: It is a sad truth that when anyone on the Internet offers to make your dog bigger, it’s always a hoax.

    *snort*

    Puppiagra!

  18. @Jack Lint

    Deadspin has been running stories about a wrestler in the Appalachian Mountain Wrestling promotion who bills himself as the “Progressive Liberal.”

    Sort of like the Iron Sheik but wimpier I guess.

  19. Okay, someone has to do it:

    What happened to the Ninefox Gambit? Seven eight Ninefox.

  20. And the inevitable Dr. Seuss spinoff:

    Fox in socks
    with gloves on box
    Nine foxes in soxes
    with doves on boxes

    Fox with gloves
    tries a new gambit
    in the ambit
    of a bandit

    Please sir, I don’t
    like this trick, sir
    smacks of calendrical
    heretics, sir

    Do I like
    calendrical rot?
    No sir,
    calendrical rot
    I do like not.

    Mister bandit
    what’s your signifier?
    Do you think
    that gambit’s dignified?

  21. Beth in MA: Started and Finished Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty yesterday. whatwhatWHAT was that??? I’m really blown away by it. It snuck up on me, and I love when a book does that.

    Yeah, I wasn’t sure to expect for that one, but I really loved it. I’m not sure how she’d set up another book in that universe, but I’d certainly be interested in reading it. 🙂

  22. (4) I saw the Apollo XI spacecraft earlier this month, in the conservation lab in the Air & Space Museum’s satellite (sorry) facility near Dulles. Besides a large number of aircraft and spacecraft that wouldn’t fit in the main museum in DC, it allows visitors to gaze from a balcony view over the entire conservation lab.

  23. Multicolored hair is fairly popular among the university students here, and I personally think it looks awesome. Of course I think the Millennials I work worth are awesome in general, so I’m obviously not the target market for these tirades.

    To be honest, years ago for my wip I came up worth a race that had multicolored hair add a genetic marker, so I’m tickled pink to see something like what I wrote about .

    In other words, I put the critics in the same category as the MRAs who scream about women with short haircuts. They can go suck on regurgitated hairballs

  24. The fact that MRAs whine about short hair is just another bonus to having it short, IMHO. I didn’t want their attention anyway. Since this summer is fixing to be hot, I’m probably going to get it chopped off. Same color, though.

  25. My son has been dying his hair rainbow colors for so long that I was surprised to see his natural hair color last month. I kind of remember it being lighter. I stopped dying my hair weird colors when my first child was born and probably won’t pick it up again, but I am considering shaving my head and letting the grey grow out.

  26. @lurkertype: they whine about you having it short? I bet they’d whine about me keeping my hair long, too, since I’m a guy. Haven’t had a “normal” cut since late 2014 I guess; I started growing my hair out in Jan 2015 when I arrived in Thailand, and I’ve only had the occasional trim since then to keep it looking vaguely tidy. It’s now beyond shoulder length and I quite like it this long, not least because I get to wear pretty orange or purple hair ties while I climb or do martial arts (I have black ones for formal occasions too). I also, until today, had a fairly mighty beard, at the insistence of my girlfriend who likes both my long head hair and my curly face hair.

  27. @Cheryl S.: I don’t know how old your son is, but for people with light-colored hair it’s not unusual for it to be very light in their childhood and then darken a bit with maturity.

  28. I think I’ve only met one multi-coloured hair person recently and she works as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan, so that’s the mental connection that pings for me whenever it’s mentioned by the brave web warriors of masculinity.

  29. Here in Berzerkely, rainbow hair has been popular with the old and the young for quite a while. It started with the punks (as Cat noted) but was quickly embraced by the hippies as well.

    Back when I was in school, a friend did what I still think is the best multi-color treatment I’ve ever seen. He cut it short and bleached it, then treated just the tips in a multi-color checkerboard. It was very subtle–when you first saw it, you weren’t sure if there were actually colors there, or if your eyes were playing tricks on you.

  30. I remember a point in the early 00s when bright, unnatural hair color was suddenly just for kids (pre-teens). Fortunately that has changed, and now it’s for… someone here said something like “children from age 1 to 90,” I think. I like that.

  31. @David Goldfarb – I don’t know how old your son is, but for people with light-colored hair it’s not unusual for it to be very light in their childhood and then darken a bit with maturity.

    He’s at the age when your formerly blond hair is no longer blond. For his sister that happened when she was about 16, but we will never know when it happened to him, because he started dying his hair earlier than that.

  32. re hair color changes: the age varies widely, as does the range. All the photos show me with brown hair, but I’m told it was red when I was born; at 18 I started growing a mustache, which was gingery for some years. (It started graying so long ago that I’m no longer sure whether it ever matched my hair.)

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