Processing the rape kit backlog in Northern Virginia:
The California partnership with Bode is new, but O’Malley has experience telling rape victims that their kits have yielded DNA matches.
Some of them cry, and some of them shut down in shock, she says. One woman’s attacker had worn a mask. When she learned there was a name to match to her faceless assailant, the woman realized she’d known him all along. He was a friend.
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MAVIS STAPLES, on singing “The Weight” for The Last Waltz:
I don’t want to be gloatin’, you know, but anytime I watch it, it’s refreshing. It’s like the first time. You never get tired of it, you know. And I remember everything about it. I remember every moment that we had doing that. Pops said, “Mavis! Baby, you shouldn’t carry it out so long like that,” when I go, “Heeeyyyy yeeeeaaah.” And I said, “Nah, daddy, that’s the good part. That’s what I feel.” He said, “O.K., do what you feel. That’s the best thing. Do what you feel.”
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Lesser-known things to say to a dress:
3. “Why don’t you have any pockets?”
4. “I look like when people clothe their pets.”
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Another exchange in the IHE comment thread handily brought up a problematic rhetorical strategy that arises often in the discussion of the adjunct bubble: the comparison to fast-food workers. One commenter wrote, “You know what’s demeaning? Earning a PhD and making less money than a manager at McDonald’s.” And another replied, “You know what’s demeaning? A PhD who thinks she’s better than a manager at McDonald’s.” This exemplifies a serious problem in the ways that advocates for better working conditions for adjuncts make their argument. (A related problem is that adjunct advocates sometimes dramatize their argument by using phrases like “slave wages,” “slave labor”). Yes, college-level teachers should make more than cashiers at McDonald’s. Not because they hold advanced degrees—to pay someone for merely holding a degree is naked credentialism; to believe you deserve more money because of your credential itself rather than what you do with it is to misunderstand the value of work—but because as a culture, we value the dissemination of knowledge more than the distribution of hamburgers. Or at least we say we do.
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OMINOUS NOISES:
Mayor Rob Ford’s letter to city clerks advising of his planned return. pic.twitter.com/SNyr7P6jSD
— Jackson Proskow (@JProskowGlobal) June 17, 2014
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Russian-Jewish American lit goes BOOM (I happen to adore Russian-Jewish American lit):
As contemporary Russia morphs back into the semblance of its old Soviet self, there seems to be no end to stories one can tell that would continue mining this nexus of immigrant experience and Russian mystique. Much of this creative output has already done so successfully, with critically acclaimed or best-selling work by all the writers already mentioned in addition to the books—so far, one from each—by Nadia Kalman, Irina Reyn, and Sana Krasikov, and with two writers of this cohort—Bezmozgis and Shteyngart—making it to The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list at the beginning of the present decade precisely as writers to watch in the 2010s. Could it be that we are at a point of oversaturation and a critical juncture: How much more is there for this literature to say?
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Women as background images in video games:
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NOPE NOPE NOPE WUT:
My husband has a wonderful family and we all get along swimmingly. His parents own a boat and often invite us on it for a day on the lake and an annual vacation where we boat all day and only return to our rented beachfront to sleep. I am a very lucky daughter in law and sharing the boat is just one example of the loving generosity my in-laws show, with no strings attached. One of my guy’s immediate family members will almost like clockwork paddle off twenty feet when we are anchored and swimming to poop in the water.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
“You know what’s demeaning? A PhD who thinks she’s better than a manager at McDonald’s.” What does that even mean? To whom is it demeaning?
It’s demeaning to the manager at McDonalds. There is nothing wrong with doing that work, and it requires a number of skills. To assume you are better than someone because they work in fast food is classism in action.
But is it necessarily that the Ph.D believes that she is better, or that she believes that she spent at least eight years on her education, which amounts to eight years of job training? It doesn’t necessarily take eight years to develop the skills to become a manager at McDonald’s.
Like, I think that my partner and I should be making comparable wages because we had to spend roughly comparable amounts of time on education and on-the-job training. Well, really I think she should be making more than I do (rather than a quarter of what I make), because her job is much more dangerous, more physical, and more valuable than mine. But in terms of education and on-the-job training – yeah, we should be equal. And a Ph.D teaching college-level classes should be making more than a 19 year old who got promoted to manager at McDonald’s – but she isn’t. She never said that she thought she was better, just that she deserved more money. Considering what she’s paid to get the education necessary for the job she’s doing? I would not say that she’s wrong.
Being a manager in any retail establishment, let alone one as successful as McDonalds requires quite a few years of experience, plus a lot of time, the ability to be utterly trustworthy with money, lead people well, take responsibility for others careers upon yourself. I’ve done retail management, and it is intensely stressful.
I’ve never met any of these 19 year olds who get promoted to manager at McDonalds. I’ve met 30 year olds who have worked their way up the career ladder there, along with a great deal of on-the-job training and company sponsored learning. Managers at McDonalds are usually expected to take a number of university-level course before they start.
So, my experience says that fast food managers have usually worked a long time and done a lot of studying. I certainly did, I only worked as a manager for three months.
So I think that thinking comes from a misunderstanding of what exactly is required to work in retail and fast food. I’m not saying the way people are paid is fair – it seems utterly arbitrary, what people get as recompense for their work – but I’m not entirely sure that jobs that require academic qualifications should naturally earn more. Work is work. Hard work is hard work. Studying is studying. And I know I will want to pay the poor soul who has to risk grease burns and physical assault a fair wage for the work they do.
Oh, we don’t disagree there – I don’t think there are many people earning a wage that I’d call fair. The minimum wage needs to be raised, the wages for pink-collar jobs need to be raised, etc. And I do think that retail/fast food jobs have value and the workers should be treated with respect. I’ve worked service jobs for minimum wage, and there was more actual work involved in those positions than in my current white-collar job.
But I still believe that jobs that require qualifications that are expensive to acquire should compensate their workers accordingly. Hard work of any kind should be rewarded, but so should the financial/time investment required to enter a particular profession. It’s not necessarily about academic qualifications being somehow more valuable – it’s about academic qualifications being much more expensive to acquire. As a student, I’d want to be taught by the most knowledgeable people with the best teaching skills, not the people with enough class privilege to spend a fortune on education with no concern for their limited earning potential.
The thing is though that the manager at McDonalds will probably earn the same £25k a year throughout their whole working life, whereas if the system worked like it was supposed to, a person with a PhD would eventually earn a lot more than that with seniority.
But yes, teachers in general should be paid more. I just reject the concept that academic achievement should automatically mean higher wages. (Of course, if loans were smaller or didn’t exist, this wouldn’t be a problem. In my fair country you don’t have to pay your loan back till you’re earning over a certain amount, and in scotland they just pay for you to go to uni)
Retail (especially food retail) is unbelievably shitty and stressful and even McDonald’s workers should not be paid McDonalds wages but it is not skilled labor. I did retail for a few years, I dug ditches in Virginia heat for a living for longer, these jobs obviously have learned techniques and varying levels of proficiency and involve much harder work than posting blog comments in an office all day, but the pool of potentially viable laborers is effectively ‘everyone of sound mind and body’ whereas the pool for university professors is ‘certified PhDs with subject expertise’, which is a relatively tiny group for whom academia already represents the very bottom of the career barrel, compensation-wise.
That I made a livable wage at all in these jobs, and was not competing directly with the $20-a-day Hispanic day labor hanging out at the gas station, was pretty much entirely down to racism. Those guys can’t teach classes effectively, they don’t speak English.
Like the article points out, this is a larger structural issue about what capitalism values and who benefits from corporatism, but I still think it’s misguided to compare an aspiring full-time professor to a fast food worker. Few people take into consideration the opportunity cost of taking a food industry managerial job–yes maybe one gets paid more than an adjunct initially, but the fast food manager sacrifices mobility, and there is a ceiling to how far you can get promoted in a store. Once you are manger, then what–corporate promotion? What PhDs are paying for, imo, is the opportunity to achieve a certain level of status (and income) through their education. That the system which initially drew so many people to higher education is no longer working is a problem.
Well said.
I disagree that the PhD thinks she is BETTER, though. But to earn a PhD requires, in my opinion, a very different skillset than it takes to be a fast food manager, and it also takes a significant amount of money up front to earn that PhD typically. I think it’s a reasonable thing to say that one person is not better than the other person, but that does not translate to the pay structure for those jobs. They are different jobs with different rates of pay.
I would also argue that the whole reason we’re talking about low pay in academia is because of the hard work of low-wage workers in other industries who are trying to make this a public consciousness issue. And yet we’re all talking about the academics and not the fast food workers. I have been in so many conversations with college-educated peers where we’re talking about inequality or poverty or whatever, and someone is inevitably like “Yeah, and what about adjunct professors, now there’s a problem!” Because if you’re affluent and college-educated you probably don’t know anyone who works at Wal-mart (gross!) but you definitely know somebody in academia.
I guess you could say there’s a class divide even within the low wage movement, between underpaid workers who have connections and cultural capital and those who don’t have shit. That kind of thing always makes solidarity more difficult (see examples: feminism, all other social movements)
I think we’re talking about academics now because everyone knows the pay of fast-food workers is abysmally low, but not everyone knows the same is true for adjunct professors. What can one do about it? Not eat at fast food restaurants that pay their employees minimum wage with no benefits, I suppose, and advocate for/support politicians who support fair wages. The same is true of schools – don’t go to a school where you will be taught mostly by adjuncts who are paid extremely low wages with no benefits, and advocate for fair pay. There weren’t a lot of adjuncts where I went to college and I just never thought about the issue until these articles have come up.
But I think even that has something to do with the relative prestige of the job. Oh, of COURSE the person who makes my hamburgers is living in poverty, but can you believe that educated people just like *us* do, too? Who would have thought?
I’m not trying to shame people for talking about adjunct issues, but the whole point of the excerpt above is that people who want higher pay often give in to the impulse to argue “but I’m more valuable than other workers!” instead of arguing that no one should be treated that way, period. And I think that in this particular case, we need to actively work to contextualize it as part of a larger wage issue or that route will win out.
Non-luxury food retail has been premised from the start on marginal profits and marginal income for unskilled labor, a couple rungs above seasonal field labor by virtue of being in air conditioning. That’s a fundamental assumption of the business model, burgers have never been viewed by anyone as a reasonable route to personal prosperity, and while the industry’s shitty and exploitative there’s a sorta “well, what are you gonna do, you want dollar tomatoes and Big Macs or not?” aspect to it that requires a greater social negotiation.
If skilled jobs that have heretofore offered good wages and benefits and been fairly accessible, aspirational careers for people without mountains of cash are suddenly reduced en masse to the same level of marginal subsistence, not because universities won’t work otherwise but because shareholders and administrators now have the power to just take away all the routes out of poverty at will, that’s a big goddamn problem and an entirely different circumstance. One’s things not getting better, one’s things getting much, much worse for everyone, forever.
I think also that there’s a common tendency, in discussion of wages/employment, to use McDonald’s as the shorthand for “god, anything but that” and for plebes. I take your point that the internal logic of those sentences doesn’t quite hold together, but I find myself wary whenever people use fast food as the negative comparison because it’s almost always lazy classism.
Yes, using “fast food worker” as a shorthand for “bare minimum amount of skill/brains” is obnoxious and super classist.
Vaguely relevant to the work article: It has always irritated me as a person who spent seven years working in retail the amount of people who made negative, classist assumptions of my character and intelligence.
I had people point me out to their children and say things like ;that’s why you work hard at school’, or people say ‘what do you know, you’re just shop staff’ to me. People assumed I was stupid, uneducated, lazy and of lesser value of a human being, because I worked in a shop. The fact that without useless, lazy thickos like me the shops that England’s capitalist, service economy relies on wouldn’t run seemed to slip their mind.
(My favourite was ‘I don’t think you should be open/working on a sunday.’ ‘Well, if people didn’t shop I wouldn’t have to be’)
And any career that trains you in the ability to smile while withstanding verbal abuse is a useful one.
As I hear time and time again – “every job is just some form of customer service.” What’s better training for future success than a few years of retail?
When I run the world every single human being, no matter their path, will have to work in retail or fast food for at least a year. And then, people in high positions will have to return to their shop floors every five years and spend six months working there.
Because I swear to god, the rules we had to work under were written by men who had last worked in a shop in 1965. As a result, they didn’t work.
If we can’t manage universal retail conscription let’s at least aim to make it mandatory for any politician who plans on saying something like “if only people could manage their money better they wouldn’t need welfare!”
I think this all the time when customers (usually older white men) are pains in the butt at the store. It’s completely obvious they have never worked retail or any kind of service, or they’d be WAY nicer to the people helping them out. Working in a store has completely changed the way I order at restaurants, how I talk to people at other stores, how much I tip etc (not that I was shitty or a bad tipper before, but now I am like, ULTRA NICE, ULTRA BIG TIP). No one would be an asshole anymore if they worked a job where someone was an asshole to them at minimum once every fucking day.
I really like your system of making everyone work retail/fast food/customer service positions for at least some portion of their life. Maybe it might make people learn to respect the humanity of the staff member serving them and the value of not being obnoxious or a slob.
I worked retail for 4+ years and may be back there again soon, and I know the amount of hard work and long hours and learning to smile through gritted teeth and meet unreasonable demands (both from customers and corporate) which it takes to succeed. I don’t regret working retail, and I respect the reserves of intelligence and hustle and nerves of steel which it takes to be a good manager.
That being said, I also hope that my significant other who really, really wants to teach undergrad (in the humanities even! oh god.) can have some hope of a return on his investment when it comes to the time/money/passion he has put into the master’s degree which he is working on. I want him to be able to make a living wage without having to teach five different classes at three different schools and be stressed out all the time. It’s not that he is afraid of hard work – he is actually one of those “janitors” which the adjunct was comparing himself to when he pulled those undergrads aside – he works full-time overnight cleaning at the community college.
But still, like the article also mentions, the amount of effort and the amount of love which teaching requires is no longer valued (although it still requires the same/even greater amounts of education/loan debt), and what was once a career which was regarded to have some security (tenure, pensions, etc.) and social value is now treated like a cog in the machine. It’s terrifying.
It’s not that professors are better than other kind of laborers, or that it is more sacred work than selling a dress, or that they deserve to be working in a fulfilling field more than everyone else who is just working for the wages, but… it’s hardly fair to say that we value education as a society and build up this mythos around the teaching profession and then leave the actual people who “dispense” that education in a such a sorry financial position.
Then there are PhDs who work in retail. It was pretty eye-opening when I dropped out of academia and ended up selling women’s clothing at the mall for a while–you better believe my manager and the team leads worked damn hard. The lowly sales associates, too: we had to remember a lot of rapidly changing information (how does the sizing on this line of tops run compared to that other one? What are today’s promotions/sales, because they’re different from the ones we had on Monday?), correctly gauge the amount of attention each individual customer wanted, and always present a smiling, efficient face to the world even though our feet hurt from pounding those concrete floors all day.
It was hard, for sure–a different kind of hard from getting the doctorate. I absolutely think that the way adjuncts are treated is a symptom of what’s going awry in higher ed right now: an increasingly corporatized model where an increasingly small number of people come out on top. A lot of the frustration that adjuncts and their allies express arises from the illusion that the academic life represented an alternative to that model, a way out–and then they finish the degree and find that nope, it’s the same crap that goes on everywhere else.
At least I was supported through fellowships and stipends while in grad school, so the PhD didn’t cost me anything but 7 years of my life, plus penalties to my health and sanity.
I worked retail for ten years before getting my library science master’s degree and I am fully convinced (and have said so in interviews) that that time in retail makes me a better librarian. Dumb questions? The public? Leering jerks? Noisy kids? I can handle it all and do it with a smile on my face.
For a few months, I was stuck hanging out socially with grad students and professors, because that was the friend group of a sudden-onset friend of my husband’s. Every goddamn time I saw these people, they would embark on moments of glaring cluelessness and rudeness. For example, on check-splitting occasions, they would all put in the menu price of the entrees they remembered ordering plus whatever tip, and be bewildered every time it came up short, because they lived in a universe without sales tax, or apps or drinks.
More than once, I heard their beautiful dark twisted blue-collar fantasies. “My job is so stressful, I swear to god, I think about just quitting and becoming a WAITRESS. No. I REALLY DO.” And I never said, “Btch, what makes you think you’d make it as a waitress?”
I have a PhD. I would be a terrible waitress.
Heh. #notallacademics, I guess. 😀
This crew wasn’t bad at heart. It was just that hanging out with them when matters of class came up was really bizarre compared to hanging out with my usual group of friends. I’m sure I have just as many if not more social blind spots.
“If every woman you know reminds one woman she knows that it looks a little clueless to leave the price tag stickers on the bottoms of your shoes, eventually no women will have price tag stickers on the bottoms of their shoes. Then we’ll be able to do anything.”
CAITY. <3
My thing is, women: take out the stitch in the back flap of your skirt! It is so easy to forget, and I often use to, but it makes it easier to walk and makes the skirt look better.
Sometimes I dream about carrying around a pair of tiny scissors and just snipping the threads as I walk past people. SKIRT FREEDOM!
AHHH this drives me crazy too! I also see it on blazers and coats with a vent in the back. It restricts the movement of the garment! Free the flaps!
My thing is snipping the little silky tag (100% wool!) off the sleeve of a winter coats. Tiny scissors for all!
I had been a full-grown adult human for YEARS before I realized that my nice work slacks did have (semi)functional pockets, they were just stitched shut so that the pants could lie flat when folded in piles in the store.
I often leave those pockets stitched shut, because they never lay flat again properly after you open them.
Yes but if you open them you can PUT THINGS IN THEM
Yeah, it’s one thing to pee in the lake (every now and then, away from other people) but pooping in the lake is a GIANT NO. That’s what beavers and muskrats do in the lake, and that’s how we get giardia, folks.
me, when someone I don’t know tries to fix a tag that’s sticking out of my clothes…
This seems Relevant to Our Interests: “a band of vicious female hoodlums devoid of morality but oozing with feminine pulchritude.”
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/13/artist-ryan-hesh…
Vicious Female Hoodlums is the name of my new Rock Band
Mine is Feminine Pulchritude.
‘Feminine Pulchritude, the debut album from Vicious Female Hoodlums will be hitting the shelves this week, and we are expecting record sales among impressionable teens. Their first single “Devoid of Morality” has already topped the charts after an unexpected release last weekend, eliciting mass pearl-clutchings and finger-waggings from upright, decent women everywhere.’
VFH won’t give a damn ’bout their bad reputations.
a bit late, but I had an idea related to the vocal fry article from a couple weeks ago: I want to make an all-girl punk rock band called “the Vocal Friars” – thoughts?
My mom’s BFF back in the day wanted to start an all-girl punk band called The Vulvatones.
That was my only thought, really. I like the Vocal Friars and how it sounds vaguely religious. 🙂
Approved, would see at the skeeziest bar in town.
I’m thinking we’ll wear doc martens and shredded, mini-skirted monk’s robes. We’ll make loud, noisy songs about subjects that most people don’t like to talk about.
“I’m thinking we’ll wear doc martens and shredded, mini-skirted monk’s robes.”
And tonsured hair! Even more badass than an undercut.
In DC news today, Patent and Trademark office cancel the Trademark on Redskins name, citing racism http://thinkprogress.org/sports/2014/06/18/345033…
OH MAN. This is actually happening? That’s awesome, I know they’ve been hinting they’d do this for a while. EAT POOP, SNYDER.
This is definitely the most important link today, although I am almost as excited to learn Feminist Frequency is back.
Also, I’m curious as to what this ruling’s being upheld would mean for my ability to print a bunch of “Washington Potatoes” shirts in the appropriate colors/fonts.
And does this ruling mean that Mr. S’s team will have to quietly deliberate on a new name, in case the ruling goes against them?
Well, the team could still use the marks and name, but so could anyone else. So if some company wanted to slap a “Washington Redskins” logo on a can of motor oil or something, they could do that without fear of being sued by the team.
I don’t really know how much of a practical difference it makes. Dan Snyder is a stubborn, racist man, so he may just keep the name even if he loses trademark protection.
But he’s a stubborn, racist man who loves his money. And the team’s profitability directly affects dozens of other stubborn, rich, mostly-white men who also love their money. The inability to monopolistically over-price blankets and hats and mugs and… would take a huge, ravenous bite out of their bottom line. If the decision is upheld, I imagine we’ll see a new name very quickly.
But I think my potato shirts would really only be amusing enough to own between now and whenever the team name changes. With the stay in-place, I probably still couldn’t get away with selling them right now. Guess that business idea will just have to wait.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the franchise’s contract with the NFL is contingent, at least in part, on the team owning its trademarks. The league benefits greatly from the branded team gear and I doubt that the NFL would be willing to part with that source of revenue. The NFL might pressure the team ownership to change the name at this point to one that would financially benefit the league.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing–that revenue isn’t team-specific so I imagine there’d be some pressure from the league.
Okay, apparently this is just wrong, at least according to this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspir…
They could still sue to block the creation or sale of knockoff Redskins merchandise, they just wouldn’t get the benefit of certain legal presumptions.
They are allowed to keep the name itself, but they lose their trademark on it (though at this exact moment, they get to retain it, pending appeal, blah blah blah, they will probably lose) which means that anyone can make, say, a Washington R*dskins sweatshirt with the team logo and sell it without infringing their trademark/triggering legal action. So it’s a huge financial disincentive for the team, because it creates this legal market for non-official team gear. For that reason, it’s very, very likely that Snyder will change the name, because lots of $$ is involved.
IANAL but I think you’ll be in the clear with your tater shirts, as they are clearly parody. I would buy one!
If you ever get a chance to see Mavis Staples live (chances abound, fortunately), do take it. She will always sing “The Weight,” and she will always burn it to the fucking ground.
Plus, “The Weight” being the perfect drop-in song, she’ll often corral guests singers into a verse:
Nick Lowe!
Cyndi Lauper
A frail Andrew Bird!
Dresses with pockets: eShakti! Sizes 0-36, custom sizing, lots of cotton rather than polyester, and ALMOST ALL THE DRESSES HAVE POCKETS. And they are constantly having sales. (I have a referral code that gives you an additional coupon, if anyone wants it.)
The adjunct piece is great. I’m staff at a college and seeing the pittance paid to adjuncts is just nauseating.
They are actually having their *best* sale right now (ends tomorrow!), which is Buy 2, Get 35% off. Sometimes they have Buy 2, Get 1 Free, but that’s only 33% (if all the dresses are the same price).
Also, the pockets are LEGIT POCKETS. I can put keys and pens and my phone in there, all at once, and the dress shape stays the same.
DAMN IT I don’t have any money til next week
I love dresses with pockets! I just bought a bunch of stuff from eShakti yesterday and was especially pleased with their selection of pocketed dresses.
I also got my wedding dress custom made with pockets, which was super convenient for carrying tissues and such.
I was so excited to order a dress from eShakti last Christmas but those pockets turned out to be hidden in enough fabric to hide a dozen small children in my skirt, Nutcracker style.
A++ Mother Ginger reference! And yeah, I love the full skirts but they are definitely not for everybody.
Fit-and-flare 4 LYFE
The day I learned the term “skater dress” was a beautiful day for my online shopping escapades
Eshakti is my JAM.
Have you found their fit to be good? I am tall and curvy so I usually have an issue with waists not being in the right place or dresses being tunics on me.
I personally have had pretty good luck, but would encourage you to go by measurements rather than what you’re used to your size being. I’ve had to take up shoulder straps on a couple of things (I am short and fat, and apparently my bust-to-shoulder length is shorter than their fit model). And I know some people just don’t find it works for them at all. However, they do ask for your height when ordering, so the length of the skirt isn’t usually a problem!
I am also tall and curvy, and have had pretty good luck. I find as long as the waist detail is higher, it looks good. It might take a little bit of trial and error, but you pretty quickly learn which cuts will look best.
I’ve only ever ordered from there with inputted custom sizing. I’m 6’4″, with a slightly apple-ish distribution of circumfrences.
The first time I ordered, I had a friend carefully measure all the widths they ask for with customization. The dress arrived, and I couldn’t figure out why it was so swimmingly huge in the bust. I had to find a very short shop lady in a fancy downtown department store to point out the problem: the waist-to-shoulder section was way, way too long. A problem I had never encountered in my life. I was able to get it taken in fairly cheaply, and have gotten a lot of wear out of the dress. Custom sizing will definitely get your waist in the right place (with maybe a little trial-and-error; order something sleeveless first, for easy shoulder-adjusting), but their default response to the “height” is, as anachronistique says, to just scale everything.
I called customer service to ask what I could do about it in the future, and their instructions were: have someone take two additional measurements for you: highest point of shoulder (HPS) to waist, and waist to knee. There’s a “comments/special instructions” box when you go to checkout, and you can type those measurements in there. The next couple dresses I ordered actually came out so well-fitted to those measurements that it was seriously weird to get used to.
Oh man, thank you for that tip about shoulder-to-waist measurement! For some reason it didn’t occur to me that that was one you could actually… tell them? Gonna grab my roommate to figure it out!
Yeah, I really wish they would include instructions about that on the website somewhere. Custom sizing was what tempted me towards actually trying to own/wear dresses again (combined with a shopping spree at Long Tall Sally’s pop-up shop, when they were still doing those), and if I had had other good buying options, I might not have pursued excellence with eShakti as long as I have
Oh shiiiiiiiiiiiit. I was on a clothes-buying ban but THIS DRESS OMG
nooooo stop leave me alone
I am wearing THIS ONE right now: http://www.eshakti.com/Product/CL0027916/Banded-b…
GIRAFFES!
I just bought this dress yesterday and am more excited than I probably should be to get it. Red! Piping! So pretty!
Super cute!
I, um, may have broken down and bought two dresses I had the sale dealy, and they had this new customer sign up thingy where I made an account and got a $25/off coupon code emailed to me 😀
Oh god the Band never fails to make me really emotional, especially considering I saw Levon sing for probably the last time at a wonderful autumn fair in the Hudson Valley with my very best friends and oh man I am getting the Band feels AGAIN. Every time!
DAMN IT I don't have any money til next week
Could we get a trigger warning on that Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video, because I found that huge montage of player abusing sex worker NPCs incredibly upsetting, and I haven’t even been abused, so someone who has might find it INCREDIBLY triggering.
Anita gives a content warning within the video herself, doesn’t she? I can’t play it from here, but I watched it the other night.
I think there might be a content warning but it really doesn’t go far enough to say “THIS IS REALLY TRIGGERING.” It wasn’t for me.
I think there might be a content warning but it really doesn't go far enough to say "THIS IS REALLY TRIGGERING." It wasn't for me.
THEY FOUND CHESTER!!!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/chester-th…
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you for the update!
Holy shit. I did not think that would happen.
I am so very glad that the world has Anita Sarkeesian in it. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the work she’s doing right now is the most significant in the entire history of video games. Can we make her the queen of something?
Love me some games, but golly is there some wretched content and culture there. I think she did such a great job with this latest video. Very solid, very informative, and all of the little loose ends that I felt she wasn’t addressing got wrapped up by the end. I really can’t wait to see the rest of this series.
As contemporary Russia morphs back into the semblance of its old Soviet self, there seems to be no end to stories one can tell that would continue mining this nexus of immigrant experience and Russian mystique.
Interesting story, but from what I’ve seen, Russia seems to be rejecting the more “modern” aspects of the Soviet era and harking back to the “glory days” of tsarist imperialism.
My sister confirmed this after a recent visit to Moscow and Petersburg – the church is more influential, they are pushing a more traditional view of women and marriage, and Nicholas II is venerated as a great leader. (That last one just makes me laugh wryly.)
As contemporary Russia morphs back into the semblance of its old Soviet self, there seems to be no end to stories one can tell that would continue mining this nexus of immigrant experience and Russian mystique.
Interesting story, but from what I've seen, Russia seems to be rejecting the more "modern" aspects of the Soviet era and harking back to the "glory days" of tsarist imperialism.
My sister confirmed this after a recent visit to Moscow and Petersburg – the church is more influential, they are pushing a more traditional view of women and marriage, and Nicholas II is venerated as a great leader. (That last one just makes me laugh wryly.)
I have a PhD. I would be a terrible waitress.
Heh. #notallacademics, I guess. 😀