RICH PEOPLE LOL OMG OMG OMG!!!!
I was at the Apple Store. Let’s not get into why. I saw the new Macbook and though the port situation is clearly a problem, that is one gorgeous, gorgeous machine and I want one real bad but I probably cannot get one without a bit of discord and I definitely should not get one. Anyway, it’s pretty. I can’t wait for the Macbook 2.0.
Goddamned Apple!
If you’re a typeface nerd, Helvetica has been redesigned. And speaking of typefaces… that Hillary Clinton 2016 logo continues to break my heart.
I love the idea of a thematic road trip. Maybe we should take one to see public art across the country. I bet that would be swell.
Like many other writers across the country, I attended the AWP conference. Vanessa Mártir writes about a deeply troubling situation she encountered where a black body was literally stepped over by countless people and draws some painful but necessary conclusions about race in America.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. I’d just come out of a panel on writing about violence where Roger Reeves said, “Violence is the American version of love.” (I can’t get that fuckin’ line out of my head.) So much sage shit was said at that panel, so much rattled me and made me choke up and cry, that I had to go outside and feel the air, the blue sky over me. It happened when I walked back in. I was still raw.
There are no more mysteries.
Real Dolls… well, I guess, we all have our sex toy preferences.
It’s a beautiful morning in Huntington, West Virginia, but David Mills wants to drink beer in the same ramshackle house where he has lived since birth. In the other bedroom is his ailing, nonagenarian father. Mills the younger is best known for writing Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism. In the foreword, Carl Sagan’s son Dorion praised Mills’s “impeccable logic, intellectual bravery, and professional clarity.” Richard Dawkins gave the book a blurb—“an admirable work”—and mentioned it two times in his best-seller The God Delusion.
In his introduction to a new edition, in 2006, Mills gleefully informed readers that he has been publicly condemned as a spokesman for Satan, a disgrace to human dignity, a moron, a shrimphead, and, his favorite, a “pitiful middle-aged man, embarrassed by his lifelong unemployment, and frozen, emotionally and intellectually, in early adolescence.”
I want a real doll that will wash silverware, drive and let me sit in the passenger seat day dreaming, and pump gas.
Stacia Brown is a talented writer who needs some help getting to a modern media writing workshop to which she has been accepted at Yale. Maybe you can hook her up with a ducat or two.
Daniel Finney, a newspaper columnist from Des Moines is chronicling his weight loss journey and I am going to follow his story.
Though I am generally loathe to link to my own writing here, I did write about street harassment for the May issue of Glamour and really, this is an issue that affects us all.
There I was, standing outside a salon in downtown Los Angeles where I had just gotten my hair cut. A man, a stranger, suddenly stopped and said, “You have such a pretty face. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re fat.” Then he tried to hug me. I felt a brief rush of fear, stepped away, and made a karate move with my arms. The man went on his way and I went on mine, though the more I thought about the encounter, the more my irritation grew. It was clear he thought he was flattering me, but let me be clear: I wasn’t flattered. The best thing I can say is that I was grateful this particular incident of unsolicited attention was mild. It was not that bad.
It also wasn’t surprising: 96 percent of American women 40 years of age and under experienced street harassment in the past year, according to a landmark survey—the largest ever of its kind—conducted by Cornell University for Hollaback, an organization fighting to end sexual harassment in public; at least one fifth of women were harassed 21 or more times. “In the past, we’ve known what street harassment looks like based on the stories people have shared with us,” says Debjani Roy, deputy director of Hollaback. “But these numbers prove: This is real and it’s prevalent.”
A real doll would never street harass anyone.
That Vanessa Martir piece is heartbreaking. I keep running up against my own stupid silence, and I know listening isn’t enough, but it’s where I’m starting from. I don’t know what else to say.
It’s an amazing bit of writing and it left my heart trembling. Also, I hope that the low-lives who would WALK OVER ANOTHER PERSON IN PUBLIC happen to read this piece and then sink away with shame, into oblivion, forever.
I can’t get that image out of my head or heart. It’s why I had to write about it and why I’m still writing about it. Thanks for reading and acknowledging. Word.
Thank you.
‘…Stuart Leaf was sitting in his Brooklyn Heights apartment when he got a call from his wife asking when he’d be home. It turned out “we’d both been home for three hours,” he said—their roughly 11,000-square-foot condo is so large that neither one realized the other was there.’
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Slide #3 in the slideshow is the bathroom. It looks like a massive living room with a bathtub in it.
I need to win the lottery immediately, so I can live in this monstrosity all by myself and cackle evilly over a glass of wine from my wine celler while lounging in my massive bathtub overlooking the lower Manhattan skyline. I would 100% become an awesome villain if I lived in that condo.
That bathroom! I would love it for a day or so and then be like “ugh omg condo, I just want to take a damn shower, stop being all luxurious at me.”
No way, it definitely has a standalone shower too. It has to. That stupid place has 6 bedrooms. They probably each have their own bathroom. Stupid rich people.
Is it just me, or does the floor look super slippery? I admit I’d also be uncomfortable bathing in front of those huge windows, though I know nobody could actually see in.
If it’s marble, and I think it is, it’s definitely super slippery. I’ve stayed in a couple of hotel rooms where their sole concession to any sort of fanciness was marble tiles on the bathroom floor and it’s quite possibly the least practical choice for a bathroom floor you could make. (Unless, of course, you enjoy a good round of bathroom floor skating post-shower.)
Shoot, the bathroom looks like a hotel lobby with a bathtub in it. I honestly thought the double vanity was the reception desk on first glance.
I thought it was a bar! Maybe it is a shampoo bar, with a shampoo mixologist who custom-blends your hair cleanser with fresh artisinal ingredients every morning, changing the formula depending on the weather and what’s on your schedule for the day. If the New York Times Style section told me such a thing existed I would believe them.
I’m surprised such a thing doesn’t exist, either in NYC or LA (I feel like it makes sense for either place?)
BRB, getting a small business license.
I once misplaced my husband in our 700-sq-foot apartment, so I can’t laugh too loudly at these people.
(He had gone out to get something at the convenience store and he somehow managed to come back home without me noticing, even though the door was within my line of sight the entire time. He went straight to the bedroom instead of joining me in the living room, so after a while I just assumed he had never made it back home and called his cellphone in a panic. That was a silly day.)
Okay, that is really adorable.
The best part is that I was panicky-ly IMing my best friend “PAUL NEVER CAME HOME FROM THE STORE!!!” and then later I had to say “Um… he was home the whole time… he was taking a nap.”
#richpeopleproblems
They were actually sitting right next to each other on the couch at the time; the vastness of the condo had driven an 11,000 square foot emotional wedge between them.
I haven’t read the article yet but it sounds like Jonathan Franzen
“a fund of hedge funds”
this is all just getting too surreal. does this condo even really exist??
NO ONE needs that much Oriental rug.
He has his own climbing wall! If it goes from floor 1-3 then I iwll be in total awe.
There’s no way it doesn’t, right? Otherwise what would be the point?
The 3,500 bottle wine room is my favorite part! If it is full and they drink one bottle a day, it will take nearly a decade to drink it all!
Like, I assume they must be collectors or investors in wine, but even so I am mind-boggled at the number of bottles that dang wine room can hold. I love books but I imagine having thousands, even in a big place (or a BEAST CASTLE), would be more distressing than enjoyable (Will I ever read them all?!?!). I wonder how full it is? I wonder if they drink the really nice stuff regularly or just grab a bottle of Columbia Crest or whatever at the local store when they want wine with dinner? I need more details on the wine room.
I’ve read about rich people who fill their wine cellars with cases of pricy vintages that have gotten good reviews, then let the wine age past its drinkability period because their drink of choice is something like Jack and Coke.
I assume there must be a wine equivalent to buying leather-bound books in bulk that you never read.
I mean… is this something they’re going to have to factor into the next apartment? Like, we definitely want a smaller place, but we’ve got 3,500 bottles of wine to house, so…
Or does the wine come with the $32 million place?
Maybe it’s terrible, but the idea of both having another person in the apartment but also having a place large enough to reside in glorious solitude is really, really appealing to me.
Like, I love my own space, but I also love cuddles and living with my girlfriend.
it WOULD be great to be able to say “I need some alone time sweetie, I will TAKE MY CONFINEMENT IN THE WEST WING!”
I WILL BE TOTALLY SECLUDED IN THESE 6,500 FEET
That is the _only_ way I would ever live with anyone again, is if it was in such a large space that one could pretend one was actually there alone most of the time, if one wanted. But that place seems too large, even for someone with my hermit-like fantasies. I mean, if you _were_ home alone, think of all the door you’d have to check behind/rooms you’d have to look in/&c. in order to ensure no serial killers and/or monsters were waiting to attack you. (Or is that just me? It’s one reason I love living in a studio — nowhere for anyone to hide! And also, why when I house-sit for friends, if I get back there during evening hours, I actually maybe leave the door open while I do a quick and embarrassing check through every room in their — thankfully small and single-story — house, because I’m paranoid and weird.)
These people need noisy little dogs. They announce every arrival. Loudly. While racing back and forth between all humans present, barking all the while.
“Did you know? Someone came in! Are you sure you know? I’ll bark more in case you didn’t know.”
No matter how vast the house, everyone in it is aware when another arrives.
Right? I’m looking at a condo later. I’ll be sure to keep that super relevant problem in mind
I love public art and would absolutely take that road trip!! I spend a lot of time browsing Wikipedia’s lists of public art, as well as local art council’s online galleries. Additionally: sculpture gardens! Indianapolis’s is critically underrated. Seattle’s is… maybe overrated? And I’m heading to DC in a month and looking forward to seeing the Hirshhorn again.
Depending on when exactly you’re in DC, you might be able to go to Jazz in the Garden! (Aka, free jazz concert in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden.) It starts May 22 – http://www.pavilioncafe.com/jazz.html
Thanks for the suggestion! Sounds like a perfect event for attending with my relatives. Have you been before? Does it get massively crowded?
It definitely does get crowded, but if you get there earlier you can stake out a spot and bring a picnic or something, and just hang out before the music starts. I’ve gotten there later and always been able to find space but in weird or cramped places.
MASSIVELY crowded. Get there as early as you can and bring a blanket to stake out some space.
I try not to care that Harrison Ford is Han Solo again, but then I find I care a lot. *sigh* I’m not even that into Star Wars, on like an absolute scale, but it got me.
Also I saw that Vanity Fair in a doctor’s office the other day and was like, yea, it seems right that people should act like this is no big deal whereas a nominally female-focussed romance novel makes everyone lose their minds. I like your robot’s assigned tasks, Roxane. I’m sick to death of doing dishes and going to the grocery store every few days. Go do my bidding!
I wonder if I could rent myself as a grocery shopper.
It’s fun!
Harry tried his damnedest to get out of it, A for effort. (I’m having some cognitive dissonance since that’s “not what Han Solo looks like, that’s what Harrison Ford looks like”, they diverged) (I’ll be fine)
Ditto – I would looove to be someone’s personal grocery shopper. Hire us!
I care about *Chewie* and, to my absolute surprise, Luke. Obvs if Leia isn’t running the whole show, I’ll be unhappy, and I worry that Abrams’ casual misogyny (c.f. his Star Trek movies) will ruin everything. But…
BUT
“Chewie… we’re home.”
I want to trust Abrams, because the “my sister has it” line with the handoff to a feminine hand gave me literal goosebumps. (I HAVE BEEN WAITING SO LONG FOR THAT) And “Chewie…we’re home” nearly wrecked me at work. I am so excited, and yet also so scared. 🙁
I’m wondering if that’s Leia’s hand passing it.
Also, is it a rebuild of Anakin’s?
Oscar Isaac said that “a princess” sends him on an important mission.
Pretty sure it’s a rebuild of Anakin’s. I am also pretty sure the awesome “female Jedi learns to control the Force and be a total badass” montage I want will continue to exist solely in my dreams. Sigh. A girl can hope. And watch the cartoons.
That would indeed be good. I’m excited about Rogue One too.
WAIT…….do you remember those rumors about a lightsaber being found?
I do! Hmmmmmmmmmm….oh it’s all so interesting…aaaaaahhhhh I am still totally going to this movie, because I can’t help myself.
I don’t think it’s Leia’s hand… if Han and Luke-Leia are in the same general age-vicinity, that hand looked too young. I think it’s his kid’s. I know we’re tossing the previously-authorized canon out, but I still think he’ll have a kid in the movie. Or could be Leia’s.
I thought I could maintain a feeling of “generally happy there’s another movie and will go see it but otherwise it’s not a big deal” but then that line happened and I lost it. I had no idea how much I cared. Like, I want a shirt that just says “Chewie, we’re home.” WHERE’S THE MERCHANDISE DISNEY LET ME GIVE YOU MY MONEY?!
My main hope, re: no more shit misogyny (shitsogyny?) is that the screenplay was co-written with ye-olde-Empire-Strikes-Back-dude Lawrence Kasdan rather than with the Triumvirate of Shitty Convoluted Modern Hollywood Writers, Lindelof / Kurtzman / Orci. (Why are we letting Lindelof near ANY movies at this point?) Also, for Star Trek, they seemed to want to play up the “classic” campy Kirk misogyny, which doesn’t really exist in Star Wars. (Wait…please don’t return the Leia bikini. Please.)
Cautiously optimistic!!
The Hoth outfit is CRIMINALLY underrated.
Hoth Outfit + Hoth Hair are prime Leia.
Are Han and Chewie’s ideas of “home” actually the same? Isn’t Chewie married? Surely his home is wherever his wife lives? Does Han live on the same planet? Or is he just thinking only of himself here, despite his phrasing?
I’m thinking they’re being reunited with the Millennium Falcon? Though why they would have given it up in the first place, I don’t know…
Oh, that makes more sense. Thank you!
Have you SEEN Chewie’s home life? It’s fucked up. His father, Itchy, has a virtual reality Diahann Carroll masturbation machine.
Yeah, I think he peace-d out in favor of the Falcon.
(I hope no one thinks I’m making that up)
I don’t like washing silverware, either — Roxane, you’re in my head! (Good luck, it’s weird in there.)
11000 square feet means that they could put three of my houses in there. My house is not small!
Imagine how much extra furniture you’d have to buy.
I think thats something like 18x the size of my apartment. My brain cant even imagine anything that size.
I just see Betsy’s aunt in my head. “Wow, that must be a bitch to clean.” http://www.dvd.net.au/image.cgi?movie_id=9010&…
I always think that about giant houses/condos, along with “…and man, what must their heating bills look like in winter?” Conveniently forgetting that if you can afford that giant pile, you can afford zillion-dollar monthly bills from Con Edison and a minor army of housekeepers.
I work at a law firm that does some divorce cases, and I’m always like “how do you need $15,000 a month to maintain your current lifestyle?!?!” but then I remember that this is why.
On a related note (from today’s NY Times):
Demi Moore’s San Remo Penthouse for Sale
“The monthly maintenance charge for the penthouse, which has about 7,000 square feet of interior living space and 1,500 square feet of wraparound terraces with panoramic park, river and cityscape vistas from the 28th floor, is $17,912.85.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/realestate/demi…
(Here in the Rust Belt where I live, you could actually buy an *entire house* for that one monthly fee…)
They could fit 11 of my apartment or 22 of my sister’s apartment! I imagine it’s not all furnished. If I had 11,000 square feet I’d probably keep a bunch of it empty for massive dance parties, roller skating, etc.
In theory, furniture shopping for so many rooms sounds kinda fun, but in practice I suspect I’d give up somewhere around the third bedroom and the rest would just have, like, a folding chair and some half-empty cardboard boxes.
So… Toast commune?
That’s what I was thinking.
I did some calculations, and I think I can afford to chip in for roughly 100 sq ft worth of this condo, assuming that I can sell my current place, get a good job in New York quickly, leap whatever hurdles are in the way of moving and getting a job and buying property in another country, and find a lender who will give me a mortgage for 100 sq ft of an 11000 sq ft condo commune.
That is 20 of my apartment. Insane.
I feel like my brain is the Pong ball and this Link Roundup is the little platform that catches it and sends it careening into bricks.
…in a good way?
That Real Doll article is the damn creepiest thing I’ve read in a while. I cannot imagine living in a home knowing that there was a life size doll just…There
…waiting for you to sleep….so it could get up and crawl across the floor to your bedside and then stand up and just watch you sleep. Without blinking. Endlessly. Forever. And eventually it would lean over and place a plastic hand over your face and
I got off track there for a bit but REALLY those things creep me right out. Not solely in an uncanny valley way, but also in a THAT IS A LIFE SIZE DOLL kind of way.
If you want to try to banish that scary-ass scenario from your mind, maybe watch Lars and The Real Girl? It is a kind of sweet indy film with a bunch of people who are now big stars. And it never gets horrible or scary.
So sweet. One of my top movies, and so under-watched (because the people who would really love it are the people who get weirded out by seeing that it’s about a sex doll).
Real Dolls seem sort of uncanny, but no more than sex machines. I wouldn’t want a sex machine, but they are also kind of awesome.
Sometimes I think men get kinda a hard time with sex toys, and we stigmatise male sex toys — I’ve know women who are freaked out by fleshlights & things like that. If I had a penis, I would 100% own some fleshlights. Except they are much more difficult to clean than dildos. Sex toys for everyone! Nothing is too weird! (ok, some things are too weird, I would be super-unhappy with a real doll made like a child).
Every time, every damn time I hear a man say, “I’m just so tired of relationships with women, that’s why I choose porn/real dolls/whatever,” I just think, don’t let the door hit you on your way out.
Yyyyyy……you’ve *heard* that?
It’s in the article linked above. It’s in a zillion articles about why feminism and women wanting to be the subjects of our own lives are causing men to stop dating women and turn to porn because women are too horrible. I have been hearing it in one form or another on the media for at least 10 years.
Hahah, I once read a comment by a guy who was excited about space travel and believed that men should start making plans now to create a men-only space colony on another planet where they wouldn’t have to deal with women.
All I could think of was, “Go for it, dude! I support putting my tax dollars to work in this way!”
That’s just so…
It just seems like people are taking the Lucy’s Lethal Libation episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater a wee bit too seriously.
I was listening to it this morning before work and it is a pretty hilarious dinosaur, which is generally what I like about old time radio thriller programs: “Womens Lib runs amok. An advertising executive suspects that women plan to take over the world when his female boss assigns him to an account with an overbearing female client who shuns publicity.”
Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) is the most fascinating of all of these weird anti-feminist groups. They’re a splinter group of the MRAs who think that all of the cultural pressure that they experience to be classical masculine is a form of manipulation, where the “reward” of women is used to exploit them by making them go to wars and work shitty jobs in the mines and stuff.
And that’s true! That’s actually CORRECT, that’s exactly what masculinity is, that’s basically exactly how patriarchy works — it’s a mode in which women are objectified so that they can be used as rewards to encourage men to sacrifice personal good for the same of some exploitative power.
It’s like they got so mired in conpsiracy that they somehow came back around to the right answer, only they got the source of it all mixed up — they think that this is somehow a manipulation perpetuated by women, who are doing it so they don’t have to go to war and work in a mine, and not, you know, the men who run the wars and own the mines. So, naturally they believe that feminism, rather than looking ot the exact same goal that these MGTOWs have, is actually some ploy to intensify that manipulation.
I can’t get over how weird this is to me, it’s like two people driving next two each other down two lanes of the same highway, but one of them insists that he’s actually driving in the other direction, and actually the HIGHWAY is backwards, and he refuses to look up from his steering wheel to check.
WOW that’s fucked up.
It sure is.
This is a GREAT explanation of MGTOW! I tried reading that I Hunted the Mammoth site for a little while, but I just had to stop because all the ridiculousness started to get to me. In this case, ignorance is bliss. Your analogy is perfect and I will forevermore explain MGTOW this way to anyone who asks.
I….Hunted….The…Mammoth.
headdesk.
Hey, We Hunted the Mammoth is fighting the good fight! It’s run by the same guy who created Confused Cats Against Feminism.
In Unspeakable Things, Laurie Penny points out that “patriarchy” doesn’t mean “rule by men,” it means “rule by fathers”, which is a thing I wish a lot of these knuckleheads understood. The system of patriarchy we’re in isn’t a rulership of which all men are the beneficiaries, it’s a rulership in which SOME men are the beneficiaries, and the rest of the men are manipulated into supporting. So you get dope after dope who, instead of realizing that he’s part of a hierarchy of oppression that treats him badly, insists that because he’s not at the top of the hierarchy (i.e., he’s not one of the men who reaps the most rewards from patriarchy) there must not be any oppression at all.
“because he’s not at the top of the hierarchy…there must not be any oppression at all.”
Do they have problems with, say, object permanence?
I legit do not understand the mechanisms you need in place for these conclusions to seem rational, I just calls ’em like I sees ’em.
I am a whale biologist.
It’s also similar to the way the GOP convinces working class people to vote against their own economic self-interests, because after all, they might win the lottery… *eye roll*
oh god I did exactly the same thing, got linked there [to We Hunted the Mammoth] by something and initially it was all ‘oh how funny, how great, a bunch of people discussing all this horrendous stuff and calling it what it is…’ and then I sort of fell down the rabbit hole and when I emerged I felt really damaged. Like, it took me a couple of days to get back to normal after reading about so much hate and distrust and general misogyny, even from a mocking context.
UGH.
They get so CLOSE to understanding what the Patriarchy is, and why it hurts men too. So very close. But then…
“Nah. The problem is totally uppity bitches.”
I think my favorite bit of this logic is the sheer willful ignorance of the number of women who DO want to join the military and work those dangerous, demanding jobs, because those are the best paying or most stable jobs available. That might require asking “why is the economy so fucked for so many people?”
I heard this story on the radio recently. http://lakeshorepublicmedia.org/stories/women-lag…
But those evil women just want to take some man’s job!!!!!
Athos! Athos is that planet!
Spoiler: It does not turn out quite like the founders planned.
I love that book, and would wholeheartedly support giving copies for free to “Men Going Their Own Way,” evangelical style: if one soul is saved…
The really weird thing about all these dudes is that most of them are at least casually homophobic, and get really mad at you when you bring up situational homosexuality as the solution for many of their problems. Like, so mad. And then they accuse you of trolling.
Oh, I don’t know, I think combining a sneering, resentful misogyny and knee-jerk, aggressively defensive homophobia maybe isn’t so weird at all.
IF YOU KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING.
I mean, I’m not saying it’s weird from the perspective of a normal person, but I’m continually surprised that not one of them seems to have a moment of “hey, wait a minute” about it.
I think those guys have got a lot invested in never examining that question too closely.
I kind of love that bit in the article when Mills is like, “um, if a guy doesn’t want to be in a relationship, that’s a really good idea! He shouldn’t be in one.” Like, for all our sakes.
Aaaaaand then he goes on to call himself the Rosa Parks of sex dolls.
Indeed. “I assure you, sir, the feeling is mutual.”
I read this article on Terry Fox yesterday and started crying at my desk. Just linking it here in case anyone else would like to cry a little bit this morning.
*heart swells with Canadian pride*
I was not aware of Terry Fox as I am not Canadian and he died only a few months after I was born; thank you! I totally cried a little bit.
After reading that Vanessa Martir piece, I just can’t even… I mean even if he was a heroine addict and had an overdose, HE”S STILL A HUMAN BEING. Stepping over someone’s body is just disturbing on so many levels.
Yeah. I just can’t imagine how you could fucking STEP OVER A PERSON. A person. A living human being in a clearly dangerous situation. How do you not check on them, how do you not get help? People are not fucking disposable.
I actually was talking to a few friends of mine last night and one of them said something about, “I wonder why we see guys doing x but never women.” (Can’t remember for the life of me what x was.)
“Sexism, that’s why. I mean, I’m sure there’s a longer reson, but yeah. Sexism is the answer.” My friend looked surprised or like she didn’t want to believe it, but it’s true. I feel like the same thing is happening here. I want to ask how you can do that to another human being, but the answer is racism. Pure and simple. They were raised to believe black bodies don’t matter, so they don’t see a person in need. They see an inconvenience.
Fuck that. Fuck every single person who stepped over that man and every single person who does the equivalent. And fuck myself, too, for the times I haven’t seen the bullshit I’m doing. I hope we all get better at this.
Yes. I would have been so creeped out to still be at that conference and look around me, and see so many people and not know which/how many of them just a few hours earlier had been stepping over the prone body of a man having a medical emergency. It is horrific.
Racism is part of it, but I think part is also the weird American mentality of “I take care of me, you take care of you, we are totally separate and have nothing to do with each other” which is bullish*t because nobody can exist on their own without their fellow people around them, and in fact nobody does. They just have a fearful and proud fantasy about it. Ugh.
Guys, I am actually pretty excited for robot sex dolls. Think about all of those Men Going Their Own Way dudes, the MRAs, the PUAs that can now just buy a sex robot and then leave the rest of human culture alone!
Shit, I’ll start a kickstarter for them.
They don’t deserve sex robots who are probably GREAT AT SEX tho.
A bunch of lame-os getting mechanically optimized robot sex that they don’t deserve is a karmic imbalance I’m willing to accept if it means getting them the hell out of here.
OK fine but only if the robots one day gain full self awareness and refuse to have sex with them also.
So that’s the Trogdor of spiral galaxies?
with one beefy arm that looks really good comin’ out of the back of its neck right dere
I’m not seeing enough consummate v’s…
Space Movie!
That trailer was everything my adolescent heart could have possibly wanted. Including a black stormtrooper. Especially the black stormtrooper. (I may or may not have had a complex bit of fanfiction that never left my langue arts notebook that may or may not have had a former stormtrooper main character who looked suspiciously like that.)
I love everything right now.
“I just want you kids to get along, that’s all I want for Christmas!”
Star Wars fandom gives me all the harried mother feelings.
Have you seen Attack the Block? John Boyega (the black stormtrooper) was in it and he was fantastic! So excited for him in this.
Yessss. I loved that movie. As soon as they announced that he was cast in Star Wars I was 100% onboard with everything.
Things I found out today: apparently I look at so many medieval things when I’m mobile that my phone’s autocorrect now changes any occurrence of ‘language’ to ‘langue’… as in langue d’oc I guess? All right then.
“Rich people LOL” is my favorite running link roundup theme (sorry, Nicole’s workouts, but you’re no 35 million dollar condo).
Mine too! You gotta stay up to date on what the rich are doing! Otherwise, how will you know how to act when you join their ranks??
“The apartment is ‘just a little bit too spread out’ for just for the two of them, said Mr. Leaf, the 53-year-old founder of Cadogan Management, a fund of hedge funds that merged with Cantor Fitzgerald in 2011.”
FUUUUUUCK YOOOOUUUUUUUU.
I can’t imagine the conversations he and his wife must have had when they, a wealthy Wall Street-funded couple, decided to move to – GASP – Brooklyn.
They’re downsizing to a 9,000 sq. ft. condo.
I feel like this new Star Wars movie is going to be fine, I’m sure it will be fine, but I feel a little disappointed by how familiar everything looks. I guess I was kind of hoping to see a post-Empire Star Wars that looked more like the post-Roman Empire Europe, maybe? Or like all those late-era Samurai movies that were just about old ex-samurai wandering around being bitter and disillusioned.
It could probably still be like that, but dang, stormtroopers, x-wings, a guy who isn’t Darth Vader but is an evil Jedi who wears black and has red lightsaber, all that stuff was in the OLD movies.
(That ball droid is real, though, also did you know it is REAL real? Like, it’s an actual remote controlled robot ball droid that can roll around and look up at you and everything. It just can’t go up stairs, I assume.)
It’s funny cause I’m the sort of person who is jazzed by the sameness, probably because I was a baby military history nerd when I first saw them and was therefore highly suspicious of the whole ‘well, the emperor is dead, guess the empire’s dead too now.’ And the way the expanded universe handled it didn’t help at all. So for it to not really be post-empire at all is so far up my alley that it’s probably illegal in most of the bible belt.
(Also, I hope the scuttlebutt is true that the red lightsabered person isn’t a jedi/sith at all. I would be 100% down with that.)
Yeah but that is what I mean, though, the idea of “post-Empire”, like, the Emperor is dead and then assorted factions try to secure the remaining troops and facilities and resurrect the name of the Empire and such (see..well, like a dozen early medieval kingdoms that insisted they were carrying on the legacy of Rome). Like, I am down with that, that’s fine — I’m kind of excited about that idea, except I want to see it intricately complicated in a way that the trailer doesn’t give me. This is like 80%, “Remember Star Wars? Remember how Luke Skywalker was in it, and also Leia? Remember X-Wings? Remember the Milennium Falcom? Hey, remember Han and Chewie? Guys, guys, guys, remember DARTH VADER?”
Well, they’ve got to try to distance themselves from the prequels somehow. ‘Hey, guys, remember all this stuff? We’re trying to make it more like this stuff and less trade negotiations.’
(On a side note, I always thought/hoped the Empire was a bit more organized than that, so they could avoid the post-Roman type mess. I mean, they must have had at least one good watertight contingency plan. One that didn’t involve cloning the Emperor. Multiple times if I remember correctly.)
I didn’t read the novels, so I’d just assumed that Grand Admiral Thrawn did what I figured would happen to the Empire: “Hey,” he’d say, “the Emperor is dead, but I’ve still got all these ships, soooo….” It makes sense to me that the whole thing would start to come apart after the Emperor, because Palpatine would have probably made sure there weren’t contingency plans without him since he figured he was going to live forever, and it was in his interests to make everyone think civilization would collapse if he died.
But that’s end-stage Roman empire, too, with succession crisis after succession crisis, because there’s actually no real plan in place for who’s supposed to take over after the Emperor is gone, I dig that idea.
Also, also, I thought the cruciform lightsaber was a pretty good indication that the (or a) bad guy here is going to be Darth Revan? Or has that been updated?
From what I remember of the books/comics/etc it was just a shit show. A complete clusterfuck that hopefully no halfway efficient military organization would allow to happen. I mean, these guys conquered pretty much everything. They must have had fallback plans, even with the Emperor off being his own self. They couldn’t have all been that dumb.
And last I saw on the subject of lightsaber guy was this. So presumably no Darth which would make me a very happy camper. I remember suffering from Sith-fatigue 13+ years ago when I was making my way through the EU and I’m more than happy to chuck it all now.
http://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/f…
Should have been a link to this somewhere in there?
I can defnitely believe it turned out to be a shitshow, if you imagine some confluence of:
1) a lot of the empire was held together with Palpatine’s force of personality and the threat of space voodoo
2) in addition to the planets in open rebellion against the empire, there were a whole bunch more who were ready to rebel once the emperor kicked it.
3) the Alliance had a couple defectors high up in the Imperial administration who could disrupt organized troop response
4) the remainder of the Imperial adminstration — assorted Admirals, Generals, and Moffs both Grand and Petty — were a bunch of ambitious sociopaths who all attempted to seize power simultaneously during the chaos.
but there are other questions, like how the whole empire was administered, that bring into stark relief that it’s not abundantly clear what Palpatine even wanted an empire for; At least Genghis Khan had clear goals — he wanted to own all the stuff, so that he could sleep with his one hundred wives on top of a giant pile of treasure. but why does Palpatine even have an empire? Surely he’s not such a perfectionist that he’s going to seize control of the known galaxy just so he can micromanage every planetary civilization?
Incidentally, the idea of Palpatine having to manage the day-to-day affairs of the Empire is completely hilarious to me. I especially like the idea that he didn’t build the Death Star because he needed a planet-killing space station, but as a jobs and economic stimulus program for the Empire’s munitions industry, and that some poor VP at Imperial Military Dynamics had to keep pitching the Emperor on weird, expensive war machines just to keep everyone empoyed.
(The guy is alwys terrified of getting force lightninged, but he has to be the one to do it because everyone thinks that maybe the Emperor kind of likes him? I think the Emperor probably knows that he doesn’t NEED a Death Star, but maybe they both know that this is just a kind of performance meant to stave off the inevitable economic decline of the Imperial Galactocracy.)
I like this idea. I am the sort who would watch an entire movie about the poor imperial schmucks just trying to do their job and be halfway good at it and ignore all the force voodoo going on because seriously.
I just sincerely hope that there were competent guys somewhere in the empire with enough brains not to let everything fall to pieces immediately. (I had to sit through something today where someone totally overplayed Hitler as the sole factor for WWII and his death as being the sole cause for its end and he called him ‘a genius’ and yeah I’m a little impassioned about this sort of thing right now. Big bads don’t do it for me anymore. I get tired of trying to remind people that a well-run, competent organization of less overtly threatening/evil people can do just as much, if not more, damage and sustain it.
“What do you have for me today, Grangdoo Shan?”
“Emperor Palpatine, it is a gigantic expensive war machine.”
“I’m not sure we need another Death Star at this time.”
“Oh, uh no, this one is different. It’s a…[sweats]…uhm…[tugs at collar]…sort of a gigantic robot camel. With lasers on it?”
“I…see. Well, I supposed we could commission a few of them.”
I mean, I would definitely buy that there would be pockets of Empire where there were competent administrators who didn’t immediately seize power, where stuff would stay substantially the same except it would suddenly be a lot harder to, like, requisition new AT-ATs.
I feel like, depending on which planets they were though, they wouldn’t last very long once the payroll system broke down, right? Or would the local Moffs just start issuing their own currency (I think the Galactic Empire uses some kind of fiat electronic currency)? But that could also be a problem, it could lead to destabilizing inflation rates.
See, man, there are so many details that we need to work out. Where is the Star Wars movie that explores in-depth the accountancy practices of local bureaucracy? THAT IS THE MOVIE THAT I NEED.
But given the realities of interstellar travel and communication (even with hyperdrive), my guess would be that a lot of the planets/clusters of people/whatever would already have been…not self-sufficient, quite, but fairly independent. But without an empire to back up the currency, you’d definitely run into trouble pretty quickly.
I feel like it’s a good question, and also it’s a good question as to how inflation can be managed in a fiat currency under complete dictatorial control where most of your materiel is (I assume?) made through automated production. The Empire definitely has hyperdrive interdiction capability; could you just shut down travel outside of the system and then insist that your (now local) Imperial Quatloos or whatever really ARE backed up? I mean, as long as you can continue to buy things with them, then for all intents and purposes they are; and since you can tax people and seize goods whenever you want to, you can easily maintain a currency-to-materiel rate that can keep inflation under control, right?
I hope they consulted Paul Krugman on this movie, there are a lot of questions about Space Economics that I want the answers too.
George Lucas would LOVE to answer your Space Economics questions, but I think Disney is not letting him put anything about galactic trade policies in this one.
Lucas gets so much shit for the prequels and their boring Space Taxes plot, but honestly, that was probably the best description of how a terminally-ineffective bureaucratic republic gets co-opted by an imperial military principate ever committed to film.
I just rewatched the prequels recently with a lot of colonialism and general ‘how do things happen’ history in my head, and I was FASCINATED by the Space Taxes stuff.
It’s really weird because obviously I saw them as a teen fan and all the words definitely imprinted on me, but without ever sinking in to any extent at all.
This time around, I was like Trade Agreements! Political Maneuvering! HOSTAGE SITUATIONS! I understand it all!!
I am here for all the discussions of everyday folks labouring under the evil empire.
They are going to be releasing a trilogy of books starting in the fall about the events between Return of the Jedi and the new movie. Synopsis for the first book: “The story is set shortly after the film Return of the Jedi and deals with the consequences of the deaths of both the Emperor and Darth Vader, as well as the power vacuum formed in the Empire’s rule over the galaxy and the actions of the Rebellion during the following months.”
I also like the suggestion in the Thrawn books that Palpatine may have been using the Force to control his troops and enhance their coordination, and that that contributed to the confusion and chaos after his death — like, losing your sense of purpose because your exalted leader died is one thing, but losing your sense of purpose because it was being literally directly transmitted into your brain by your dead exalted leader will REALLY fuck you up.
Ball Droid is awesome! Love Paul F Tompkins take on it.
https://vine.co/v/ezM9vIFWQHq
Hahah, I once read a comment by a guy who was excited about space travel and believed that men should start making plans now to create a men-only space colony on another planet where they wouldn't have to deal with women.
All I could think of was, "Go for it, dude! I support putting my tax dollars to work in this way!"
Have you seen roadsideamerica.com? You can plan a whole road trip focused on public art and roadside attractions. I would never have seen the chocolate menagerie in Daffin's Candies in Sharon, PA!
The first “SPACE” link – I cannot BELIEVE the APOD site (Astronomy Picture of the Day) site still looks the same! My dad set that as our browser home page on the family computer when I was in…early high school? Which was around 1998.
I’m sure the resolution of the photos has increased over time, but otherwise, identical for the past SEVENTEEN YEARS (at least). There’s something really comforting and nostalgic about that.
In fact, June 16 of this year will be APOD’s 20th anniversary!
When the site first launched, I was a space-obsessed kid with the good fortune to live under the dark skies of small-town Arizona– and it was an exciting time for astronomy, too, with the discoveries of the comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake. Scrolling through the archives of the early years is a real nostalgia trip.
Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke I guess :). I love the APOD site, I make all my computer backgrounds photos from there.
Oh man, APOD fans absolutely must check out Goddard’s vis-lab studio! http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/
I’ve spent many an hour finding cool, public domain animations for work: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=…
It definitely does get crowded, but if you get there earlier you can stake out a spot and bring a picnic or something, and just hang out before the music starts. I've gotten there later and always been able to find space but in weird or cramped places.
it WOULD be great to be able to say "I need some alone time sweetie, I will TAKE MY CONFINEMENT IN THE WEST WING!"
Can we. . .not link to the Manifest Destiny Billboard Project? I know it’s just included on the list, but that project is so messed up and is disgustingly fetishizing the idea of “Manifest Destiny” ie genocide of Native Americans. Almost all the artists are white, they are selling MANIFEST DESTINY PERFUME and have included cute little quotes like “To me, there’s a real outlaw attitude that comes along with Manifest Destiny” and “To us this is really all about the personal journey West and all the hope and disappointment that comes along with that”.
I looked and can’t find what you’re referring to (maybe they deleted it?) but that sounds so, so gross.
It’s the second one down in the “public art” link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-06…
seconded
So my husband and I almost had an art fight because the conceptual artist seemed well-intentioned, but all that talk of exploring problematic history went…nowhere. So.
Yeah, it’s certainly not actively malicious, just very very clueless. They pay a little lip service to it being a “problematic history”, but none of the billboards even remotely address that. And the artist says “”The project is more interested in the personal dimensions, about being on your own journey West and experiencing “all the possibility and disappointment of the arrival.” So basically, they’re totally buying into the cowboy/pioneer bullshit we were taught about Manifest Destiny in 2nd grade, and made an exhibition all about that, with some vague acknowledgement that it was also ‘problematic’. Rather than like, a word that was solely used to justify the mass genocide of Native Americans.
We sent them a petition and multiple requests to change the name, and they can’t even be bothered to address it. It drives me nuts because. .. what would the reaction be if they put up an exhibition called “Mein Kampf” that was “really about the journey to Poland and all the possibility and disappointment of the arrival?”
Oh man, NEVER play minigolf on a course designed by artists. It’s the WORST.
I went to the Walker mini golf course a couple summers ago, and it was very charming, but man those artists are not good engineers.
It wasn’t the focus of the trip, but I did a road trip down about half of Route 66 a few years back, and there was SO MUCH ART along the way, even when I wasn’t looking for it.
One thing that specifically comes to mind – the murals (covered in signatures, as well) that popped up in Joplin in the time between the tornado and when I arrived:
(More at http://gettingmykicks.tumblr.com/post/8892381606/…)
Wow that Real Doll article. I couldn’t get past the first couple of paragraphs, perhaps because I’ve been following the current sexism issues in atheism quite closely recently and I just…..couldn’t. So I guess the only other thing that really stood out to me was that Huntington WV is where Travis McElroy of MBMBAM lives.
“current sexism issues in atheism”
So, I looked that up. And started reading the Real Doll article and…yeah, the face that Harry makes when Sally tells him why they don’t make “Sunday” underwear. That’s exactly the face I’m making.
There we go. Couldn’t find it online, I had to come home and cap it. See what I did? I didn’t let it lie.
So… that address… am I reading it wrong, or do those condo owners actually have a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge they want to sell you?
Real Dolls are super creepy. Wake me when robot wives become cheap and effective.
In the meantime I have an awesome dishwasher.
Daniel Finney’s piece is excellent. And in watching the video, I like him immediately. He has great presence, and I enjoy the way he’s using nonjudgemental language in his writing. I am definitely going to follow his story.
He’s “the Rosa Parks of sex dolls” and declares that men aren’t going to sit at the back of the bus anymore.
I…umm….yeah…
I mean, perhaps the real doll is serving a valuable purpose here in that he’s going to be too busy sticking it in his latex lady for 2 minutes and then berating it too for it’s slutiness, to interact with real women.
A condo THAT big???? I’d roller skate in it!
Can you imagine all the opportunities for breakdancing?
You could play the world’s most epic game of sardines.
There’s the death I deserve. Right there.
“He never did figure out how to brake without flipping forward…..kid left the balcony door open and…”
Unless Olivia Newton John and Gene Kelly appear to save me.
But I’m not holding out much hope.
The best thing about leaning into some hetero-norms is never having to drive, and always sitting in the passenger seat daydraming, putting on makeup, or texting. You have to play dj, but it’s worth it.
“What is this strange power I feel?”
“You feel the Force… awakening in you.
…Technically, you feel your body producing a surge of midichlorians, the biological vector of the Force– which, despite being the energy that binds all living beings, only manifests in people who inherit a certain blood factor. This simple plasma screening will reveal– Abrams? What the shit is this? This reads like Lucas wrote it. I think I got an early script draft by mistake.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll just put a lens flare on you in post.”
THAT REAL DOLL ARTICLE WAS VERY WEIRD AND IT COULD’VE DONE A GOOD JOB IF IT HAD ANALYZED WHY PEOPLE LIKE REAL DOLLS BUT IT DIDN’T AND INSTEAD I LEARNED A LOT ABOUT AN INDUSTRY I NEVER KNEW EXISTED AND I AM VERY FREAKED OUT THAT IS WHY I AM SHOUTING sorry human sexuality is a spectrum and life is a rich tapestry, etc, BUT HONESTLY WHAT WHAT WHAT
I found myself feeling quite smug and feeling badly about feeling smug, because Gwyneth Paltrow failed her ‘food stamp challenge’ 4 days in.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp…
Surely failing at it because you’re too rich to know how to scrape by is the point.
I found myself feeling quite smug and feeling badly about feeling smug, because Gwyneth Paltrow failed her 'food stamp challenge' 4 days in.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp…
“Real Dolls… well, I guess, we all have our sex toy preferences.”
AND IF THIS WORLD RUNS OUT OF LOVERS
WE’LL STILL HAVE EACH OTHER
NOTHING’S GONNA STOP US NOW
http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-rogue-one-plot…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NELx1y8cr1M
PEOPLE!!!!
http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-rogue-one-plot…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NELx1y8cr1M
PEOPLE!!!!