Completely Pointless & Arbitrary Blog

Say for example you work at an office in Reykjavík. You have a co-worker who has dark hair, skin, and eyes, and you ask her where she's from. She replies she's from Kópavogur (a suburb of Reykjavík). In this situation, it would be rude to follow up with "yes but where are you really from?".

First of all, "where are you really from" needlessly conflates ancestry with where someone is from. If your co-worker was born and raised in Kópavogur, but her mother is Pakistani, then she still is really from Kópavogur. Her mother being Pakistani is a completely separate matter of ancestry. She may have ancestry in Pakistan, but she as an individual was still born and raised in Kópavogur, so is really from Kópavogur.

Second of all, it's never polite to single someone out and treat them differently because of their appearance, especially aspects of their appearance they have no control over (like hair, skin, and eye color). If someone with blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin can say they're from Kópavogur, and just have that left alone without anyone prying any further, then it's not fair that someone with dark hair, skin, and eyes can't just say "Kópavogur" without it being pried into and questioned.

I collaborated with the Human Artistry Project to make this strip alongside other web cartoonists to make the point that “Stealing isn’t Innovation” when it comes to A.I. usage. It seems to be doing numbers on instagram and elsewhere, so you may also read it here, tumblr.

There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

And me.

You're Not Fat, You're Beautiful

yes i spent my entire life until a few months ago assuming green eyes were an urban legend

"what about all the fictional characters with green eyes" thought it was a trope like with anime protagonists having naturally purple hair

i found out by watching Desperate Housewives (one of the actors has green eyes and it threw me off)

(i had never watched Desperate Housewives until that point bc i assumed it was reality tv, of the same genre as Real Housewives Of Metropolitan Areas franchise)

i still haven't seen green eyes irl, i am simply aware now that they actually exist

See this shawl? Isn't it a lovely shade of orange? WRONG.

It's yellow & red. I know it is, because I spun the yarn for it, and there was NO orange in the roving. But because the colors are in close proximity to each other, the brain interprets it as orange, especially at a distance.