Link Roundup! Ithaca Meetup! -The Toast

Baby Standing In a Scratching Post, Pursued By Dog

SO, Mallory and I are doing a talk at Cornell on the evening of the 7th (this Thursday!), but I get in the night of Wednesday the 6th (will be at the Statler Hotel circa 7:30pm) and was thinking it would be fun to hang out for a bit in the Regent Lounge at the Statler to meet some Toasties. It will be super chill, I am going to drop my stuff and just sit in the lounge and talk and hug whoever shows up, and I would love it if you came! Mallory may make a cameo, but I will not make promises on her behalf! I think we might also try to do something in the hours before the Shop Talk, but I will just do whatever Ithaca Toasties tell me to.

you can buy Adventure Time Doc Martens now (Mallory already has)

super interesting (to me, anyway!):

Occasionally, actors’ heads are even pasted back onto CG models of their own bodies, as one star’s was when he returned for reshoots of his big-budget action film a year later. “He was very happy to have a digital scan of his body for this movie,” says a producer, who asks to be identified only as “the friend of an international sex symbol,” “because he went through an intensive and pretty joyless diet and training regimen for six months before shooting.” Rather than hitting the gym yet again, the actor taped fresh footage of his face that was matched with animations of his body at its peak hotness.

Producers can also use effects to save precious shoot days instead of waiting for an actor to get ripped, gain weight, recover from an injury, learn a skill, or deliver a baby. Instead of forcing star Jack O’Connell to starve himself completely in Angelina Jolie’s prisoner-of-war biopic Unbroken, Lola finished the job with digital “emaciation.” Instead of waiting out Claire Danes’s pregnancy, the producers of Homeland would paste the torso of a skinny double onto hers.

your boyfriend is an abusive monster and needs to be hurled into the sun:

About a year and a half ago, I realized I was neither in love with nor physically attracted to my boyfriend any more, but being afraid I’d hurt him, I put off breaking up with him for another six months. By the time I mustered up the courage to talk to him about this, feelings had been hurt, he had got depressed and failed his thesis twice. He told me that I needed to stay in the relationship for another semester until he tries to graduate again, to undo the damage I had done, otherwise his life would be ruined. Knowing that I had made a terrible mistake by stringing him along, I agreed to it, but I now really wish I hadn’t, because the mess is bigger than ever. (Since I’m no longer attracted to him, sex feels bad and I turn cold whenever he touches me, which he is upset about and we argue all the time; I’m emotionally distant but he wants me to be loving and supportive, and while I’m nice and generally friendly towards him, it’s clearly not enough, etc.) The current situation is terrible for both of us, but especially for him – he’s going to fail his thesis again due to my insufficient support, he’s worse off emotionally because, as he said, “my life was fine until you entered it – now the train has gone off the rails and everyone on it is dead”. His career-to.be is the only thing he’s good at carreer-wise, and now I’ve taken that away from him. Had I known this was going to happen, I’d not have hesitated about the breakup.

I still care about him, and I don’t want his life ruined, but I don’t love him as a girlfriend any more, and I feel like pretending just hurts us. On the other hand, he insists I should stay and try harder. He doesn’t accept it when I say that I’m no longer attracted to him – I should either get into specifics / “be honest and say the real reason”, or it’s only a “politically correct bullshit excuse”. (I feel like we are not compatible emotionally, and my feelings have changed towards him – that is all to it.)

I look forward to seeing what this is supposed to be in the real Dr. Strange film. pic.twitter.com/PZYtgbUyIj

— M.H. Williams (@AutomaticZen) April 3, 2016

The New Yorker’s long piece on the lives of Filipina domestic workers in the United States who send money back to their own families was very, very good and hard to read. If I had a criticism to offer, it’s occasionally positioned as a “American women go to the gym or work while Filipina migrant workers raise their kids/look after their aging parents” in a way that elides the notion that…dads…might be involved in this transaction? This can come up a lot in “if she works, my wife’s salary wouldn’t even provide childcare, she might as well stay home!” as though childcare comes out of a woman’s salary and not out of the combined salaries of her and her partner. It is honestly a very small complaint about a very good, very well-done piece, and I do not want to prioritize my guilty feelings as a mom who has a (white US citizen, as it happens) nanny over the importance of having a piece that centers the stories of migrant workers facing unimaginably hard choices:

Emma and Nella found that in the eyes of many employers Filipinas were at the top of the ethnic hierarchy for domestic workers, as if their nationality had become synonymous with family duty and deference. Some two hundred thousand women are employed as domestic workers in New York State, a number that is expected to rise in the next decade, owing to the aging of the population, the entrance of more women into the workforce, and the lack of publicly funded services for the very young and old. A 2012 survey by the National Domestic Workers Alliance found that two-thirds of nannies, housekeepers, and home health aides were immigrants, half of whom were undocumented. Through their work, New Yorkers are free to have a public life, while the women working in their homes remain invisible: domestic workers spend long hours in private apartments, and are often paid off the books, with few of the legal protections afforded workers in other fields.

this may shock you but school testing procedures are a fucking motherfucking clusterfuck for disabled kids