Roxane on Sandra Bland:
Recently, my brother and I were talking on the phone as he drove to work. He is the chief executive of a publicly traded company. He was dressed for work, driving a BMW. He was using a hands-free system. These particulars shouldn’t matter but they do in a world where we have to constantly mourn the loss of black lives and memorialize them with hashtags. In this same world, we remind politicians and those who believe otherwise that black lives matter while suffocated by evidence to the contrary.
During the course of our conversation, he was pulled over by an officer who said he looked like an escapee from Pelican Bay State Prison in California. It was a strange story for any number of reasons. My brother told me he would call me right back. In the minutes I waited, my chest tightened. I worried. I stared at my phone. When he called back, no more than seven or eight minutes had passed. He joked: “I thought it was my time. I thought ‘this is it.’ ” He went on with his day because this is a quotidian experience for black people who dare to drive.
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I saw Kingsman this weekend. The ending is stupid and bad and not-good and actively offensive to me as a human and a woman and a filmgoer, and I would like us to express our feelings around it via GIFs and emoticons and such.
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Hood’s porny polemic, with its talk about wives being mounted and begging from the corner, is proof of how the term “cuckservative” is popular because it pushes psycho-sexual hot buttons. Racism and sexism have always been connected, with one of the prime justifications for racial hierarchy being the supposed need to protect white women from black men and also, more implicitly, to keep black women sexually submissive to white men. A “cuckservative” thus conjures up one of the supreme nightmares of the white supremacist imagination, the fear that white men will assume a submissive role (or position) in the sexual hierarchy.
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The crime of homelessness in Los Angeles:
“The de facto policy on homelessness in L.A. is enforcement and criminalization,” said Eric Ares, an organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a group on skid row that advocates for the homeless. Ares sees the mayor’s call for compassion as empty rhetoric that distracts attention from what the city could be doing. “At this point it’s no secret what the solution is: it’s housing and services,” Ares said. “But what we’re seeing is — and this has been going on for at least 10 years, particularly in the gentrifying parts of Los Angeles — a blank check for policing.”
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ugh why isn’t mallory here to talk about this
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In March 2013, the townspeople gathered in the neighboring village of Kalachi to celebrate the spring festival of Nauryz. They watched their children perform traditional Kazakh dances, sing songs, and recite poems in the village’s playground. After a few hours, they settled into the bar next door for the evening, drinking into the night. Over the long weekend, three college-age kids and five adults fell ill with the same symptoms. First they would slur their words, as if they were drunk. They would see double, and start swaying, then they would fall asleep and snore heavily. They could be roused, speak, go to the bathroom, even eat food, but then they would fall back asleep. They stayed in this state for days. When they finally woke up, they didn’t remember anything. The villagers didn’t understand what was wrong. Maybe the kids had been doing drugs, they told each other, maybe the adults drank too much. But it didn’t add up.
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Essential female directors! 25 of them!
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broseph tried to leave 13 different comments on Jess’ emotional labor piece, nikki banned his i.p. just as I set him to auto-delete, but obviously you want to see this:
Can’t explain that! He got us there!
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I’m amazed that it took me so long to get the joke behind the name “The Toast” and the motto “A Willing foe, and sea room.” Kudos.
Wait, sorry, I still don’t get the joke. Could you please explain it?
“A willing foe, and sea room” – it’s a toast.
Um, I still don’t know where the joke is…? *feels dumb*
“A willing foe, and sea room’ is an actual toast once used by the British navy. They apparently had a toast for every day of the week!
So “toast”, the bread, and “toast” the dinner initiator. Take your choice.
thaaaannkkk you, I was at Andy Dwyer “I was going to ask but now it’s too late,” levels of confusion on that and now I appreciate the pun. 🙂
While we’re discussing toast things we’re embarrassed/amazed/etc not to get already, anyone want to explain the “ancient grains” tag to me? (of is it sort of like “beauty” where, just, sometimes things go in there because they’re beautiful, etc etc? I grok beauty. I just feel like I’m missing something on ancient grains.)
I think select older posts are tagged “ancient grains” as kind of a greatest hits.
I take it to be riffing on the foodie fad for “ancient grains” such as amaranth, but referring instead to old slices of Toast, in other word,s old articles.
Yeah, it seems like it’s just things originally posted prior to 2/1/14…. but…. why? why have a tag for old things? do old things get put into that tag after a while? If I check in another couple months, will it be things before 4/1/14?
Am I overthinking this? (probably)
What confuses me is how the Ancient Grains box only ever displays the same four or five articles. I’ve seen that “Dreaming with Jen Doll” picture with the contact lens box on top of a paperback book more times than I could hope to count.
It seems to cycle through the first 4 or 5 things tagged as ancient grains, which seem to be the first 4 or 5 things.
Wait, what?
“A willing foe, and sea room” – it’s a toast.
Wait, but seriously, what is the funny part?
The ending of Kingsman was SOOOO TERRIBLE. Why would you take a movie with Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Caine and then do THAT?
I avoided Kingsman because I swore off all Millar adaptations after the offensively terrible Wanted, but I recently read this (huge) article by Film Crit Hulk and now I kind of want to watch it just to see if he had a point. I probably shouldn’t, though, huh?
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/07/17/film-crit-…
………………… Now I can never see Wanted again. I spent the entire time so distracted by the sexy that I didn’t notice a single offensive thing (although I did feel myself willfully ignoring the utterly implausible. also, i’m pretty sure i immediately deleted the ending from my memory upon leaving the theatre). So I have this perfect memory of angelina jolie being badass and james mcavoy being adorable while NIN plays in the background, and I have a feeling that if I saw it again i would probably not enjoy it as much.
thank you for helping me to avoid deep sadness.
…… If I enjoyed the movie version of Wanted I seem to have created in memory, do you think I would enjoy reading Wanted?
Wanted the movie has pretty much almost nothing to do with Wanted the comic and thank goodness for that. The movie is actually a vast improvement over how awful, awful, awful that comic is – but then, most Millar-comic movies are better than his comics because it barely takes any effort to be slightly less terrible than he is.
I still enjoy the Wanted in my memory because, thanks to Cleolinda Jones, I hear McAvoy yelling “FOR NARNIA!!!” in the big shootout at the end.
…. I…. might know a guy who, at least at times, has a significant resemblance to Tumnus James McAvoy.
I will not admit the way that makes me feel here, as there is enough overlap of “people who know him” and “people who know me” and “people who read the toast” and “people who might choose to read back in my comments”.
The graphic novel Wanted is absolutely nothing like the movie, which is why I hated the movie.
What I objected to in Wanted was that the underlying message seemed to be that unless you’re a killer, you’re a feminized loser wasting your life.
I think the underlying message I got out of that movie was that unless you’re angelina jolie, you always have room to be more badass.
I’m not saying that that message was less objectionable or the one that was intended (probably neither were true), but it certainly contributed to my enjoyment of the movie.
I certainly approve that message!
In case anyone is interested in reading that, but doesn’t like feeling like they’re being screamed at the whole time they’re reading something, check out The DeHulkifier.
Oooh, thank you! Now I can finally read that essay that went around ages ago.
Thank you!
I’ve never seen Kingsman (and probably won’t be seeking it out), but it’s an interesting article.
Exactly my reaction. I had no interest in seeing Kingsman when I read some initial reviews, including the Guardian review that he references in that article, but after reading Film Crit Hulk’s take, I’m considering it. The “most honest James Bond movie ever made” point was really interesting to me, as were the class issues. (Also, I pretty much universally trust Hulk, he always has great recommendations.)
Yeah, you know, I frankly had a blast with that movie and the ending was a complete buzzkill.
Same same same.
Yes! I was loving it right up to the last 10-15 minutes. Ruined the whole thing.
Right there with you.
Yes, yes, yes.
Every time I think about the ending of Kingsman, I get IRATE. It was like everyone ran out of fucks to give and ruined what had been, to that point, an almost decent movie.
I had actively blocked the ACTUAL terrible ending of Kingsman from my brain, because I needed to sublimate my rage, and so when Nicole was tweeting about it, at first I actually had no idea what she was talking about. I was like, “You mean when the heads of all those people exploded like fireworks? I mean yeah, that was dumb and cheesy.” But it wasn’t until like an hour later when I went, “OH RIGHT. THE PRINCESS OF SWEDEN.”
It was erased from my mind, I hated it so much. My brain was like, “Nope, can’t keep that in the ol’ conscious memory and still function and not scream at people on the street. Gonna have to bury this deep.”
Until you wrote “Oh right, the Princess of Sweden” I could not remember _at all_ why someone would have been grumpy about the ending. I was like “I mean, I guess it was annoying how [person] died? And there was a lot of wanton shooting… and…”
I watched them movie like, a week ago. Completely erased from my mind as well, but I now recall being really unimpressed while watching.
Oh man, me too! I watched it with a bunch of friends and we were chatting all the way through it so I was like, “Oh, maybe there was something bad in the heads exploding that I missed?” But no, the effing princess. Raaaaaage.
Yeah. It didn’t happen.
I was so excited for Kingsman; Colin Firth, being a suited badass gentleman spy, I am there for that! But the ending was just so bad. so so bad, bad idea, badly thought out, badly executed. Just no.
The Wikipedia summary isn’t helping me understand which part everyone is so mad about — can someone please explain?
There’s an anal sex joke (framed as the hero’s reward for killing all the bad guys) complete with a shot of the “Princess of Sweden’s” very lovely butt.
Honestly… it’s dumb and I would personally have cut it (if it had been up to me), but I think acting like it’s an insult to feminism and women everywhere is a just a little much.
(At least I think that’s what Nicole is talking about? There’s also a lot of gratuitous violence).
The Film Crit Hulk link posted by Hedwig goes pretty in-depth on this, but the essential argument is that Kingsman is a very dark satire of James Bond films, that never winks at the viewer, and that making the ending that explicit is essentially rubbing the audience’s face in what the Bond films just elide (since a number of them end with something similar, Moonraker probably being the best example), in theory with the intention of getting people to think about why they’re ok watching a movie that displays the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, including several hundred rendered in gruesome detail, but get upset at a sex scene.
I dunno, maybe because this is a woman who has been kidnapped and held against her will, and they have her say to the hero, “If you save me, I’ll let you fuck me in the ass.” Then immediately after the hero slaughters thousands of people like their heads were champagne corks/fireworks, his number one priority is getting back to the stone prison cell where she STILL IS, and it’s not to free her, NO! It’s to go get his dick in someone, and the actress is directed to be there smiling and ass up, rather than acting like an actual human person. IIRC, she says something coy about whether he’s “here for his reward”. It’s not the existence of a sex scene which is upsetting people (the Kingsman fanfiction leads me to believe people would have preferred a lot more sex scenes), it’s the travesty of a sex scene they chose to film. And I have a hard time believing that Mark Millar was just trying to get people to reanalyze the way we think about sex in films.
The whole thing is a send-up of spy movies, and no one in the entire film behaves like a real person at any point, so I’m confused as to why that’s the standard you’re applying to this scene. It’s parodying Moonraker and other Bond films that end on a sex scene without cutting away at the “tasteful” point. And Mark Millar didn’t make the movie; Matthew Vaughn did and he has actually discussed his goal of subverting standard spy movie tropes.
“But it’s a parody!” doesn’t have to shut down discussion over whether it was a good addition to a parody, or a trope worth sending up in that particular way.
In the article you link to, Matthew Vaughn says that its inclusion was very intentional and deliberate, and seems very aggrieved that the audiences he showed it to BEFORE THE MOVIE’S RELEASE gave him the feedback that they were not into that scene.
“Some people can’t handle it. But it does make me laugh. … Afterward, people are, ‘Oh, it’s was really good apart from that bloody puerile moment.’ Where was that puerile [attitude] when you were laughing? I can’t wait to hear the discussions people have after Fifty Shades of Bloody Grey.”
So he had gotten negative audience feedback about the scene, but kept it in anyway, seemingly at least a little out of pique. That decision is absolutely open to criticism. And his response seems very petulant.
Yeah, but after he says “Can I get a kiss?” completely jokingly, before he goes off to kill tons of a people, SHE brings up the anal sex. I appreciate the agency the woman is given, here. And the princess is written the whole time as tough as nails and not in the least bit intimidated by her situation. Frankly, although it’s an obvious James Bond gag, she appears to be way more into it than the majority of James Bond sexpots.
… if it helps, which it probably doesn’t, in fanfic this terrible scene is often solved by 1) Eggsy not actually being interested in sex once he gets there, and breaking down crying over Harry; or 2) the princess having brought quite a lot of strap-ons, and she didn’t actually specify who was going to top; or 3) being elided completely.
I am an unapologetic Eggsy/Harry shipper though (and I recognize this is also problematic), so mostly I just ignore the scene completely. Didn’t happen. Just like that other major plot point that didn’t happen.
YESSSSS. As a fellow Eggsy/Harry shipper, I just wanted to second your claim. I rather enjoy how the fics just go out of their way to avoid or redirect this ending completely. One of the very very many reasons why I love fan fiction.
*hartwin fistbump*
So they’ve found out about Queen Victoria. All right, let’s pack our things, the jig is up.
Challenge on that Broseph; Queen Victoria’s power was largely nominal in a monarchy with a powerful and clearly defined parliament. The most powerful woman in the world was probably Sorghaghtani Beki, the wife of Tolui Khan, whose political maneuverings controlled the future of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century.
You beat me to it ! I was “actually-ing” his inaccurate Queen Victoria quote as I read it because she wasn’t all that powerful, and thinking of the last Empress of China, Catherine the Great, Queen Elizabeth I, and our modern example Janet Yellen were/are far more powerful.
Right? Women should not be competing against each other, and should instead unite against the patriarchy but if they ARE going to compete with each other in some kind of Historical Lady Thunderdome, my money is on Dowager Empress Cixi over Victoria Regina any day of the week.
“Historical Lady Thunderdome” would be an amazing miniseries. Netflix, make this happen please
Like a feminist, not-horrible version of Celebrity Deathmatch? I am so in.
Like a ladies-only Rex Factor? Regina Factor? Hmm, we’ll workshop the title…
FACTORIA REGINA
Yes perfect
this forever
……………… The first time I read this comment, I read “Janet Yellen” but processed “Jane Yolen” and was momentarily VERY confused.
I think people underestimate just how much influence Jane Yolen has had, though.
Met her at a library conference (Jane Yolen, not Janet Yellen) a few months ago and can confirm: Very Powerful. Also adorable. And sassy. And doesn’t have time for people to worry over her/ fret that she’s too old/ tired for anything.
I met her once when I took a class at Smith College! And I agree with all of your assessments!
I read “Jane Yolen” as “Jane Weidlin” and was all nah, she’s badass, makes sense.
I *heart* J-Yells! What do you think: more or less powerful than Angela Merkel?
Thank you for this, I was recently having a debate about who the Most Powerful Woman was. I was repping for Victoria and my conversation friend made your point about nominal power but did not have anyone convincing to fill the gap! I’ll be sure to fire that debate up again tonight.
“Most Powerful” is a weird question anyway. Is it “official ruler of the largest population”? “Able to make decisions that have some effect on the largest number of people”? “Able to have the largest number of people straight up killed”?
To make it even more weird, are we looking at “largest number of people” as a hard count, or in the context of world population at the time? A quarter of the world at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign was (assuming I didn’t bungle the math) around 430 million people, which is about a third of the population in modern-day China or India.
yeah unfortunately the only real solution here is Thunderdome
When Victoria’s first child was born, the doctor said “Oh, Madam, it is a princess,” and the queen replied, “Never mind, the next one will be a prince.”
So there was definitely no need for feminism in Victoria’s court, not at all.
If the last 30 years have taught us anything, it’s that rich people will buy anything marketed to them by psychopaths, especially if it promises to make them skinny or younger.
Tell me more of this Queen Victoria you speak of…
So glad to have a MAN around here to explain why we should all leave feminism and go rule England for ~equality~
That actually is a good idea, though, HAVE you considered just going and becoming the monarch of the 19th century British empire?
It’s sort of an extreme political-leadership version of “well if [media] offends you so much, make your own!!!”
The end result of dudely feminism! A chicken in every pot, and a globe-spanning colonialist empire for every woman!
……… We’re going to need more globes.
DWB
Oh, hello officer, nice to see you
no, I don’t know why you stopped me,
but I can guess
Oh really, an escaped felon? Was he
driving a BMW and wearing a suit and tie?
Well, I can see why you might be confused,
so am I!
That’s quite a coincidence, from what I hear
Pelican Bay was a bit more, shall we say,
austere?
Yes, this is my car, why do you ask?
Yes, of course, it is “you who are asking
the questions”…No, I don’t want to be
‘lit up’, as you say
Well, have a nice day
No, no! I am not “trying to be funny” –
you can put that away.
http://librarymole.tumblr.com/
I will never understand butter coffee, or trends of that nature, but the author of Kitchenette is a racist, sexist bully who has a history of yelling at commenters to die in a fire and fuck themselves with a rake. I’m sad to see his work spreading. 🙁
Butter coffee makes as much sense to me as putting cream in coffee (which is to say: none; I drink my coffee in the Greek style: black, sweet, and with a pile of sludge at the bottom).
Is the person C. A. Pinkham who is the Kitchenette author? I don’t know how the new Kinja stuff works, I thought “Kitchenette” was just a category of posts.
Yes. Well, kitchenette is his vertical. Except for a few rare posts (and only recently), everything on Kitchenette is his. It was part of this lousy recruits program Gawker Media did. Pinkham, nee Ubertrout, started out as a commenter. He was an active member in a Jezebel subkinja (now disconnected from Jez).
NOTED thank you for the clarification!
Fortunately, there are plenty of other people complaining about how ludicrous “bulletproof coffee” is.
This person seems to have a problem with butter, which means I have a problem with them.
(I have no stance on butter coffee, you do you when it comes to food.)
(He also seems to think that only Americans use butter excessively, which…ok, dude.)
“reverent, undying butter worship”
This sounds like something a confused anthropologist visiting the Minnesota State Fair would write, not someone who is fully aware of the popularity of margarine.
Yeah, “America’s undying back-and-forth on the subject of butter” seems more accurate. I mean…the French have an actual reverent, undying worship for butter. Indians like butter so much they figured out how to make a superior version of butter that is actually more buttery than butter. Americans are just weird about butter, seemingly because everyone likes it (because c’mon, it’s butter), but we’ve been told for so long that it’s bad for us.
Grant proposal to send confused anthropologists to the Minnesota State Fair.
Possibly the only grant proposal to include a funding request for deep-fried Snickers.
omg cannot imagine what they would say about Princess Kay of the Milky Way
There are plenty of decent, moderate, forward-thinking believers in butter, who are not represented by the extremists who wish to drink it
Hi there – not to defend somebody who doesn’t deserve defending, but I’ve been reading CA’s kitchenette posts, and while I’ve seen him be rude and sarcastic in the comments, I’ve never seen racism and sexism from him. I have, however, seen him defending women and minorities from sexist and racist commenters, and very often taking a strong anti sexual harassment stance as related to female waitstaff.
He’s definitely not openly racist and sexist. And I believe that he believes he’s neither. He does a very good job of saying the right things and befriending the right people while bullying the “small” people-ie the new/rare internet commenters who aren’t recognized people (no cachet, as he’s retorted to people in the past). It took a long time for anyone to notice the pattern. Also, he would often dismiss comments before replying to them with abusive language (weird kinja quirk, the thread is still active after being dismissed and can be accessed with a direct link) which is why a lot of us didn’t see it.
So, in other words, he’s not actually detectably racist, you just don’t like him and felt like throwing that out in the hopes nobody’d question it.
No. There’s plenty of evidence now. It took a while for it to be put together (except for those who fell victim to his behavior, they knew, silently) because of the way he did it. But it’s out there now and community members were able to openly talk about what happened to them, and find out that they weren’t the only ones.
There’s not much context because it was written for people who are active in the kinja subblogs and understand how kinja works. But here’s your proof. http://clashtalk.kinja.com/evolution-of-a-writer-…
The comments are the thing you should really read. It’s where people get to talk about, for the first time, what he did to them. Somewhere in there is a thread about how sexual assault survivors got bullied off of a feminist forum by him.
Yes, C.A. Pinkham, when he was still masquerading about as Ubertrout, would use his clout among the commentes of Jezebel simply to boost his pageviews to earn more money as part of the “recruits” program that Gawker Media had going for a while. In addition to being racist and sexist, he also subjected one of Jezebel’s most beloved commenters (who is on the Austism spectrum) to a horrible amount of bullying simply for posting more often than Ubertrout would have liked.
What did he say/do? I’ve only ever seen his work on kitchenette and those posts seemed to be generally okay.
Edit: Nevermind, I read further down into the comment thread.
as soon as possible, I plan to work the phrase “porny polemic” into a conversation.
the most powerful human to have ever lived
She had a pocket full of horses,
Fucked the shit out of bears,
Threw a knife into heaven,
And could kill with her stare.
Love it!
VICTORIAA, VICTORIAAA
Ten stories tall made of radiation
You want nonsense? You get nonsense!
Victoria Regina
nobody meaner
ate babies for breakfast
every damned day
Now that she’s dead
they show off her head
at Buckingham Palace
but you have to pay
victoria, victoria
2.3368 meters, fuckin killin for fun
spread, spread, the empire
she’s coming
she’s coming
she’s coming
I love you all.
My favorite thing about the deleted commenter is that now that we know that HE is one of our most serious critics, heck, we’re nearly there, folks! How much farther do we really have to go? Not far, I feel certain.
Butter coffee is an abomination.
My wife has mentioned that this is a Cuban thing sometimes. She also likes to dip buttered toast in her coffee (well she dips pretty much everything in her coffee).
Is the Bulletproof coffee guy the one who went traveling to some ~*exotic~* country like Tibet and found that herders traditionally drink their coffee with yak butter?
And now he’s selling this drink and making millions?
WHITE PEOPLE.
My thoughts exactly! Is this butter coffee just a twisted appropriation of butter tea? I could totally see some white American asshole going on an Eat, Pray, Love tour and then deciding to make his own coffee version.
Please tell me more about this butter tea you speak of.
As GG said, it’s basically tea mixed with yak butter. I wonder if all the alleged health benefits of butter coffee are based on observations of butter tea drinkers, whose good health presumably comes from their active lifestyle/non-Western diet more than the butter tea itself.
I directly attribute my bout with giardia to yak butter tea.
See, personally what with the yuppie love affair with kombucha I woulda backed the ayrag pony for next fad to sweep the nation, which just goes to show why I’m not a millionaire.
OMG BUTTER COFFEE a woman at work gave me this recipe, in the hushed tones of “female co-worker sharing diet secrets” which is the sign that you have truly become One Of Us, and she said, “you just put some coconut oil, and a pat of butter,” and I couldn’t even say anything, because I thought I’d MISHEARD because that is sooo ludicrous?
But no? It’s a real thing? Thank God for this article + outrage or I would have TRIED it, thinking I was missing the memo on “being a grown-up means putting effing disgusting things in your coffee.”
Yeah, it sounds weird, but it’s actually pretty good and doesn’t taste all that different from putting cream in your coffee. I actually ended up trying it because the coffee I have at home is pretty bitter and I was out of cream. Still, I would def not make it a regular thing. It was super annoying and kind of gross to clean all the butter residue out of my blender and it was gross to see the oily sheen on my mug after I’d finished. Also, it made me feel full, which I guess is why people do it, but I just felt like that threw me off from a regular eating schedule. It couldn’t be healthy to have nothing in your system but butter coffee for half the day, right?
how dare you say that about whiskey
Bulletproof coffee is great.
I don’t have a gif for it, but the ending of The Kingsman was one of the worst endings to any movie I have ever seen.
They would see double, and start swaying, then they would fall asleep and snore heavily. They could be roused, speak, go to the bathroom, even eat food, but then they would fall back asleep. They stayed in this state for days. When they finally woke up, they didn’t remember anything.
In my early 30’s, I started falling asleep and not waking up for days. The first time it happened, I’d dropped my toddler daughter off at my grandmother’s house, on a Friday afternoon, so I could run some errands. I went home, sat down on the couch to watch TV for a few minutes and I fell asleep. I woke up what I thought was a few hours later. It was dusk outside. I called my grandmother and said, all cheery and stuff: “Hey I fell asleep, so I’ll be by in about an hour.” My grandmother was silent on the other end of the phone, except to say “Okaaaaay.”
I noticed on the TV that the news was doing early morning traffic reports. I thought, “that can’t be right.” I went outside to get the newspaper, and there were 3 newspapers in the box. Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning.
OMG, I had just lost 2-1/2 days. It felt like I’d been asleep a few hours, and instead it was days. I didn’t remember getting up, I didn’t remember going to the bathroom, eating, drinking. I was totally freaked out and off-balance.
Over the next year, this kept happening, with the longest sleep five days. And every time, it felt like I’d been asleep a few hours.
My doctors didn’t believe me. They said a lot of “must haves.” You must have gone to the bathroom. You must have drank something (water, orange juice, not alcohol) or eaten something. But when I woke up, there were no glasses out, the pitcher full of OJ was still full, no food was missing.
I thought the sleep was from extreme stress and exhaustion: going to school full time, working part time, being a single parent. But doctors just gave me cat looks. I was scared, though, that someday I’d fall asleep with my daughter in the house, but the sleep always happened when I’d dropped my daughter off at a relative’s house.
So, the sleep thing can also happen without alcohol intake. After I quit having so much stress in my life, the sleeping stopped for a while. But sometimes I wake up and wonder what day it is and it turns out that time has passed. My pdoc said that it’s possible I was dissociating, and someone else took over my body. The last time I lost days was a few years ago and it is truly discombobulating.
I think you can be so stressed and exhausted that your body just shuts down and you go into bear-hibernating mode.
That is completely terrifying.
Oh wow, that’s so disturbing! I can’t even imagine how scary that must have been for you, but I’m glad you’re okay. Bodies are so mysterious.
Wow, that’s really scary.
Terrifying, disturbing and scary are three great adjectives! I did DBT therapy, the In the Moment stuff, and I keep a diary and check it several times a day to make sure I know the day of the week and the date.
Good Lord, I’m utterly amazed by your coping skills in light of such terrifying experiences.
Few things do more to stand in the way of gender equality (and harmony among the genders) than feminism.
Yeah I love how he’s like “we’re your strongest critics.” Um, “strongest” in terms of “loudest on the internet,” sure.
It never seems to occur to these dudes that you need to understand something pretty well to offer a decent or useful critique of it. It’s like going onto a medical blog and being like “well, have you considered that you have an excess of yellow bile which is causing you to feel restless?”
Rookie mistake. Everyone who really knows what’s what realizes that it’s always a problem with too much phlegm.
Perhaps by “harmony among the genders,” he actually means “women shutting up and letting me feel good about myself.” Yes, I think that’s what he means.
So, I was in Kazakhstan for about 6 months in 2002 doing linguistics research, but I ended up going to an oil industry trade show because it was there. There was a lot of focus in the materials in the company towns in supporting cultural traditions but not a lot about safety standards. One of the brochures I picked up had an image on the back which really sums it up: it’s the classic pose of two hands cupped together to hold water only instead of water it’s crude oil. It really encapsulates everything you need to know about natural resource extraction in KZ. I should dig up the brochure and scan it.
One of my favorite pastimes is to watch people jump on the bulletproof coffee bandwagon, and then watch them jump right the hell back off once they realize it goes through their colon like a biblical flood, carrying all before it in its wrathful turbulence.
It’s like Olestra all over again!
I chose not to see Kingsman based on the trailers alone. When explaining why to my parents, I said, “The heroes are embodiments of white British imperialist culture, and the only characters of color are the bad guys. That’s pretty messed up.”
To which my mother responded, “So you’re saying black people can’t be bad guys?”
NO MOM THAT IS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO WHAT I’M SAYING.
OMG MOMS!
I fail to see the fuss over butter coffee. Coffee is gross and terrible to start with, so how could adding butter possibly make it worse?
Well, that’s the whole point. You’re drinking it for its magical weight-loss age-reversing properties; if you were enjoying it you wouldn’t be doing it right!
The Kalachi story immediately put me in mind of an article I read ages (as in years) ago, about a young girl who would sleep for days at a time. She could be woken up occassionally to drink some water and go to the bathroom but otherwise she was out. Luckily her mom was a nurse and really advocated for her, and I think eventually she got a diagnosis? Does that sound familiar to anyone? Now I’m really curious what it might be. I did a quick google and Kleine-Levin syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleine%E2%80%93Levin_syndrome) seemed like the best fit but I’m not sure. It actually does kind of sound like what’s going on in Kalachi, too, although I’m not sure how a syndrome can be communicable??
I think I read the same article but I can’t remember any more details about it!
Edit: Found it! http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/teen-with-sleeping-…
Wow, that’s totally it! I guess it’s true what they say, that nothing ever really dies on the internet.
OKAY HERE ARE SOME MORE RAD FEMALE DIRECTORS!
Agnes Varda – I was really surprised that she wasn’t on the original list. One of the core, canonical French New Wave members – check out Cleo From 5 to 7 for a great character study with high levels of New Wavitude, or some of her more recent memoir/documentaries like The Gleaners and I or The Beaches of Agnes.
Maya Deren – A leading candidate for originator of the American underground film movement. You can find dreamy shorts like “Meshes of the Afternoon” and “At Land” on Youtube.
Lotte Reiniger – The Adventures of Prince Achmed is A M A Z I N G. The oldest surviving animated feature, done with shadow-puppet style silhouette animation of dazzling beauty and intricacy. This movie is BRILLIANT and GORGEOUS and I LOVE IT SO MUCH.
Other quick name-drops: Lois Weber (important silent filmmaker), Ida Lupino (The Hitch-Hiker), Sally Potter (Orlando), Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda), Faith Hubley (animator)
Oh yeah almost forgot Elaine May, Ishtar is actually v funny, ok bye
*whispers* I didn’t think Ishtar was that bad either
Miranda July! Divisive as all get out, but I happen to love both of her films, especially You & Me & Everyone We Know.
))<>((
Re butter coffee: I was wandering through a rapidly-gentrifying section of Brooklyn recently, and the way I really knew it was rapidly gentrifying was, I went into a cafe and saw both butter coffee and vinho verde spritzers on the menu.
I’m pretty mystified at the people who seem to think that putting butter in coffee is some sort of deeply weird, if not disgusting, thing to do. Is heavy cream OK? Well, butter is heavy cream that’s been churned. It’s the same stuff. And, in general, putting fat in coffee is not such a bad thing if you’re into a ketogenic diet and want something that your body can burn for energy that isn’t carbs. (Coconut oil is another favorite.) That’s separate from the fact that the “Bulletproof Coffee” guy is deeply into the woo, which dovetails neatly with his selling special coffee and special oil which, as you might have guessed, costs several times what you can get in a supermarket.
Also, I won’t see Kingsman because Mark Millar. He’s literally one of the worst things that has happened to comics recently, and in particular never tires of hitting the sexual-assault button.
Skip Kingsman and just watch John Wick again.
There are John Wick fans here, right?
yep
John Wick was the best. I’m excited for John Wick 2 (in which, I assume, gangsters [maybe the Triad or Italians?] will kill his cat) and then a whole series of John Wick films (in which various criminal organizations kill progressively stranger pets belonging to John Wick, forcing him to kill all of the criminals, presumably ending with John Wick 8 featuring a gang of Atlanteans killing his pet ostrich).
Yes. I accidentally watched this in a hotel room and I am a better person for it.
Present
This is off-topic but I read this longreads piece: http://www.gq.com/story/serial-killer-girls-rocky… on the Edgecombe County serial killer, who’s been preying on low-income black women in North Carolina, and this quote from the police chief made my SKIN CRAWL:
“[The victims’ families] need to stay on law enforcement,” he said. “You have to stay on us. Let us know that you’re not going away until you know we’ve done everything we possibly could do. Because if you don’t care, I don’t know why we should.”
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
What the ACTUAL fuck. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Because caring about victims of crime is your actual JOB, assface. We pay you to care about people getting killed.
“Okay, chief, well, in your own words, what would YOU say your job is?”
I think this expectation of the families is the crown jewel of emotional labor (since we’re talking about crowns). Comes complete with passive-aggressive demand that it is Required Or Else.
Because it’s LITERALLY YOUR JOB. Jesus.
………………. I mean, when police talk to the community about what their enforcement priorities are, and police do things like make drug busts a lower priority than other things, then, yeah, sure, if the community doesn’t care then maybe the police shouldn’t care.
is there anywhere at all where a SERIAL KILLER wouldn’t be a community priority? like, I sort of assume that one is ASSUMED.
I mean, so I guess we know that conservatives watch a lot of cuckold porn? Not really surprising, I guess.
http://www.eater.com/2015/7/27/9047493/wine-theft…
“A source tells the Daily Mail that thieves evaded lasers”
UH
“formed a chain to pass hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of French wine… between them and out of the building.”
WHAT
“The group popped bottles of Moët & Chandon champagne after finishing the job.”
YES
The main problem with coffee is that it’s not chocolate.
i, for one, would be more than happy to enter into some sort of coffee-for-chocolate swap scenario…
Why do so few coffee places have ever halfway decent hot chocolate? I mean, people are drinking mochas all the time so why is it still a problem?
Re: Queen Victoria — several friends and I were having a discussion of…something, idk what, and one woman kept referring to England as a “matriarchy.” I stopped her to ask in what way England was a matriarchy, and she said, “well, I guess I mean monarchy, so it’s pretty similar,” and then I had to stop the entire conversation to explain the history of the British monarchy, and the fact that having a single ruling Queen doesn’t actually constitute a matriarchy, because WHAT.
She then made the argument that a strong cultural emphasis on the importance of motherhood also creates a matriarchy, which is another reason England is culturally matriarchal.
::Inigo Montoya emoji::
I really want to know what aspect of her education has led her to assume that a monarchy is the same as a matriarchy. It’s like she views Elizabeth -> Victoria -> Elizabeth as the entire history of European royalty. WHAT.
This is a person who’s ripe for reunderstanding feminism, though, because if she doesn’t understand what a matriarchy is, she probably doesn’t understand what patriarchy is, either.
What’s particularly weird about this is that she and her boyfriend moved out here from California, are both super new-agey, and big on interrogating paradigms, creating space in the conversation to consider new ideas, etc. And the matriarchal comment was in the middle of an explanation of how the traditional Celtic zodiac differs from the Roman zodiac. Like, this is not a conversation in which we should need a sidebar discussing what does or does not constitute a matriarchy.
man, I don’t know, my experience with people who talk about things like “matriarchy” in the context of spiritualism is that they do not have a good understanding of what “matriarchy” is.
Didn’t the whole Celtic tree zodiac thing get debunked awhile back?
IDK. For one thing, we never actually finished the astrology conversation, since I derailed it to discuss what matriarchy is. And also what monarchy is, apparently.
Ohhhhh noooooo
I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time recently, and it was literally my personal nightmare, because women’s value were reduced to their wombs. That is NOT a matriarchy.
So what she was talking about was the stern maternal figure who exerts a strong influence on her family, and is the real center of the home, arbiter of morality, etc. Still, though, not a matriarchy.
I just want to say, a propos of nothing, that I have the same teacup in the picture for this Roundup! and I feel inordinately excited and gleeful. It is my favorite cup, too. A very fine cup. Finally getting some recognition! Congratulations cup! Okay I’m nutty I’ll stop.
Are you kidding? I cried when one of my favorite mugs broke during a move. You are perfectly reasonable.
Guardian story on Kazakhstan: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/17/myst…
(Clicksave version: Oh it’s just carbon monoxide from a defunct uranium mine? Reduced oxygen levels apparently triggering some kind of human hibernation? nbd then.)
DON'T DISS ANGHARAD LIKE THAT, KERMODE.
(Also, can't one argue that that casting choice makes it more interesting? When casting a character who has experienced lots of being treated as a sex object by powerful men, but who insists despite their behaviour that she is not a thing, it feels like it works pretty well to cast someone who has been "slobbered over by Michael Bay" and give her the opportunity to play a more nuanced and agency-heavy role.)
My roommate bought Kingsmen on Bluray and I have seen, heard and felt it about 10 times this month and I am so done with it. But when I suggest he play something else, he turns on Django Unchained. Which makes me cry every single time. So. Kingsmen it is. Or find a new movie to overplay and hate.
My roommate bought Kingsmen on Bluray and I have seen, heard and felt it about 10 times this month and I am so done with it. But when I suggest he play something else, he turns on Django Unchained. Which makes me cry every single time. So. Kingsmen it is. Or find a new movie to overplay and hate.
Thanks!