I suspect the ratio of Sansa to Red Bone Squeaky Toy will be changing over time. Also, the background is obviously The Ice House, which I am rewatching for the second time in two months, this time with my mom.
This FitzGibbon Media situation is B.A.N.A.N.A.S.
A joint statement from former FitzGibbon media staffers put out Thursday evening said staffers had “reported over a half dozen incidents of sexual harassment and at least two involving sexual assault committed by Trevor FitzGibbon against his own employees.”
“For decades, Trevor presented himself a champion of the progressive movement, claiming to support and respect women and feminist issues, from equal pay to reproductive rights, but his actions prove a hypocrisy so great that FitzGibbon Media closed its doors today, as we could no longer continue working under his leadership,” they said.
Asking for help from a system that literally doesn’t speak your language:
A 2011 University of California study of 20,712 Asian-American elders found that Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese respondents — most of whom reported limited English proficiency — were more likely to express symptoms like hopelessness, worthlessness, or even major depression; but Japanese respondents — of whom 9 in 10 reported speaking English every well — were the least likely to report those same symptoms. Compared to non-Hispanic white respondents, all groups who were more likely to report distress were also less likely to have seen a mental health professional. Which is to say: Of those Asian-American seniors who might need help, very few of them actually seek it.
A backlash against American Muslims is leaving a mark on some of the nation’s youngest minds.
After seeing presidential candidate Donald Trump call on television for barring Muslims from entering the country, 8-year-old Sofia Yassini checked the locks on her family’s home in Plano, Texas, imagining the Army would take them away. She raced to her room and stuffed a pair of Barbie dolls, a tub of peanut butter and a toothbrush into a bag. She insisted on bringing boots for the long boat ride she imagined was coming.
When her mother, Melissa, arrived home from her work as a human resources manager, Sofia ran into her arms and cried.
Jake Perry, who a reader informs me is a cousin of Rick’s, raises billion-year-old cats, please enjoy every detail of his eccentric nature and crackpot theories BUT MAYBE HE’S RIGHT:
Jake Perry is a cat man. Standing about 5-foot-7 and often clad in workman’s clothes, the 85-year-old Austin, Texas, plumber is also a father and husband. But anyone who’s met Perry will tell you—first and foremost, he’s a cat man.
Perry’s cats broke the Guinness World Record for oldest cat. Twice, actually: The first record, from 1998, was for a part Sphynx, part Devon Rex named Granpa Rexs Allen who made it to age 34; the second, from 2005, is for a mixed tabby named Creme Puff who lived to age 38. Since the 1980s, Perry has adopted and re-homed hundreds of cats, at his peak raising four dozen at once, showcasing the best and brightest in cat shows. According to Perry, it’s not just Granpa and Creme Puff who had unusually long lives: About a third of his cats, he says, lived to be at least 30 years old—about twice the average feline life span.
Rebecca Solnit (Lolita, men, rape, jokes, empathy):
A group of black college students doesn’t like something and they ask for something different in a fairly civil way and they’re accused of needing coddling as though it’s needing nuclear arms. A group of white male gamers doesn’t like what a woman cultural critic says about misogyny in gaming and they spend a year or so persecuting her with an unending torrent of rape threats, death threats, bomb threats, doxxing, and eventually a threat of a massacre that cites Marc LePine, the Montreal misogynist who murdered 14 women in 1989, as a role model. I’m speaking, of course, about the case of Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate. You could call those guys coddled. We should. And seriously, did they feel they were owed a world in which everyone thought everything they did and liked and made was awesome or just remained silent? Maybe, because they had it for a long time.
This year, a German designer named Phoebe Heess created a fabric that is purportedly 40 percent darker than the existing blackest black. Heess has named this color Viperblack, after the Gaboon viper, itself superlative: It is the world’s heaviest viper, with the longest fangs and the most venomous bite. The Viperblack fabric is made of cotton, crowd-funded on Kickstarter, and contains Kevlar, which cannot be cut with a knife. In an interview with Dazed, Heess’s creative partner, Gabriel Platt, cites as inspiration for Viperblack a Tumblr meme of Wednesday Addams that reads, “I will stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.”
While Heess and Platt aren’t the first to explicitly chase a blackest black, they are the first to develop it exclusively for fashion. They are preceded by researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who have worked to achieve a black with 99.965 percent absorption, using carbon nanotubes. Called Vantablack (from Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays), it renders three-dimensional objects flat. This material isn’t fit for clothing: it’s too crumbly, too carcinogenic. Used in infrared cameras, it has already been sent into outer space.
The worst people in the WORLD are Sandy Hook truthers, and I am so glad this asshole got fired:
“Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of his photographic image,” the couple wrote in calling for the professor to be fired.
Our own Ella on the joy of having her Tall Man home from the hospital for Christmas:
And so he is: the Tall Man is back in the Tiny Flat, and we are preparing for Christmas together, and it is the purest joy I have ever known in all my life. I’ve found the recipe for happiness, and it’s this: find someone you love with your whole being, and have them taken from you, and snatch them back just in time for Christmas. Snatch them back, and have them sit beside you while you bake gingerbread. Snatch them back, and have them help you manhandle a seven-foot pine tree into your two-room apartment on the second floor. Snatch them back, and have them go ’round Waitrose with you, bickering gently and joyfully over the best kind of fat to do the Christmas roasties in (it’s goose, of course).
I will literally cry if you buy this man a chair:
Dear Prudence,
Last Christmas, when my boyfriend and I were still dating, I gave him a card promising the delivery of a chair he had always wanted. At the time, I hadn’t actually ordered the chair, though of course I intended to do so. Flash forward one year, and you’ll find us no longer together—we amicably parted ways in the spring—and my ex-boyfriend still chairless. Although we remain friends, I’m torn between wanting to honor my original gifting promise and thinking that, at this point, I don’t have to buy him anything! Compounding the problem is that I’ve now moved onto someone new; ordering a belated Christmas gift for an ex-boyfriend feels decidedly unseemly. Do I need to fulfill the material promises I made while still in love?
—A Shady Chair-acter
Oh, the good intentions I have given myself credit for without ever following through on them! I wish I did not relate to your situation quite so much.
Vulture rounded up Leslie Jones’ tweets about finally watching Breaking Bad, and I am dyinggggg:
My contribution to this Billfold piece about our best pop culture purchases of the year will be a surprise to no one.
Please note this very important correction to Mallory’s trashy memoirs piece:
The Scientist has arrived in Michigan and I am crying happy tears.
Focusing on the wrong thing, but the line “including the president and actor Edward Norton” that made me think… hm, yes. I could go for President Norton.
And that’s where Oxford commas come in handy.
Not enough items there for an Oxford comma. /pedant
YESSSSSS it is so so nice to see a positive, meaningful news story.
That Rebecca Solnit piece is magical. I want to stitch at least half of the sentences onto pillows and then throw them on the bed and take a big, long feminist nap on them.
The whole part about Scott Adams. SO! GOOD!
SAME!
I really have nothing to add, just: ahhhhhhhhhhhh feminist naps.
(And yeah, that piece: I have never nodded in agreement so much in my life.)
Some of the comments on “Men Explain Lolita to Me”, which is not an article explaining Lolita, are men “explaining” Lolita to her.
*headdesk*
“We’ll take it from here, little lady…”
Why did I go back to confirm that this cavalcade of bullshit existed? What is wrong with me?! Those comments are like being trapped at a philosophy grad student “party.”
If you took a drink every time someone at that party started a sentence with “Well, actually” you’d be held to a higher standard for any/all of your actions afterwards. And SUPER drunk.
I’ve accidentally played this drinking game in real life, I think.
Oh no I feel compelled to do it too.
There is some very smart sassback going on as well, which *almost* made up for it.
Yeah, I saw the sass & thought “Ahh ok I am giving myself permission to close this tab.”
It’s wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful. Straight white men! I like many of you but /the whole dang culture/ is deeply & very subtly tilted to your advantage.
I read that piece yesterday and really enjoyed it, but was then SUPER angry about male-dominated staff meetings at work this morning.
OMG I tweeted that SAME thing but in Spanish yesterday. Solnit, inspiring women to think and stitch.
I really love the piece but then a trans girl I follow noted a weird use of “transgendering”. We all have our blind spots, I guess.
Not one of the sentences to be stitched onto pillows, certainly!
I am always disappointed when someone invents Blacker than Black fabric or pigment or something, and doesn’t name it fugilin.
Nevertheless, I am hell of buying yards and yards of viperblack as soon as I can.
I came here to say exactly the same thing. May Gene Wolfe live to see the name in wide use. (God, that book. Just…THAT BOOK.)
maybe they’re all saving fugilin for something even blacker.
Hotblack Desiato’s ship designer bides her time.
I might love you?
The danger in making even blacker fabric, the uber-black, is that there is a danger of it sucking up all of the colors in the universe like a fabric black hole, so our whole world would look like the pre-colored parts of the movie Pleasantville.
Sounds okay to me, I figure we should at least give it a shot.
Have to admit that I was hella tempted by that Kickstarter, even though I have too many T-shirts already and don’t need/can’t really afford a ~$70 shirt.
Today is the day I learned exactly how shitty Scott Adams is. It’s not really a shock because, well, Dilbert, but his shittiness just goes so much further than I had expected.
‘But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.” OH MY GODDDDD
I cannot even imagine the mindset of a person who reads something like the Elliott Rodger “manifesto” and is like, “oh yeah, this seems reasonable, I could totally picture myself doing this.” It’s terrifying.
I know!! I know. I’m guessing that the Rebecca Solnit essay led you there (as it did me), but I can’t help myself from copy pasting her entire glorious paragraph of PURE TRUTH here:
Dilbert comic Scott Adams wrote last month that we live in a matriarchy because, “access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman.” Meaning that you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you, which if we say it without any gender pronouns sounds completely reasonable. You don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you, and that’s not a form of oppression either. You probably learned that in kindergarten.
“You probably learned that in kindergarten.”
A+++++++
Yeah, he’s kind of a tool.
me rn:
The comments! The Menz are sads.
My bad, I read them.
Aughghghg the aunt in Dear Prudence!!!! STOP IT WITH THE CRAPPY JEWELRY MLMS, NO ONE WANTS THAT.
I’m beginning to develop an eye twitch any time those come up around me and people close to me are developing a hair-trigger reflex. “No!!!! Don’t mention Scentsy to her or she’ll spend the next half hour telling you why it’s a scam that primarily targets women!!!!” NO REGRETS I will rant about this til the end of my days.
I enjoy your MLM discussions! Never stop.
You are not alone, every time I see someone on Facebook post about Scentsy or Jamberry or Posh or any of that stuff I just want to scream IT’S A SCAM, GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!!!
I have a classmate who is otherwise very, very bright who does MLM. I friended her on Facebook so I could invite her to a class party and within SECONDS she had added me to her MLM Facebook group. Now I have a really hard time respecting her. :-/
Or that facebook “secret sister” gift scam thing? Someone I know totally fell for it, even after we told her it was a pyramid scam, even after we linked to snopes, she still deeply believed it was gonna work out. She just graduated from a (really good) nursing school (on top of her quality MA and BA), so while I’d ordinarily just end this with some sort of “higher education cannot always foster common sense” type sentiment, I’m honestly just very worried about her future patients.
OH LORD IN HEAVEN DO NOT GET ME STARTED ON THAT I COULD TALK FOR HOURS
HOURS
…………… So, I mean, like several other people here, on one hand I do actually want to encourage you to rant here about MLM, and on the other, I wonder if there’s an entire pitchable piece? Because when I really want to rant for hours about something in comments, usually there’s something I put in the gmail draft labeled “toast pitches” that I am endlessly proud of having, and yet never ever* work on at all.
*this is an exaggeration. I have half of a first draft of one thing. So not much of an exaggeration.
I can definitely pitch that. I have hours of ranting saved up.
I second this; please do it!
I am also here for the MLM rants. Happy to listen to any stories anyone may have.
Ughhhh my bestie’s idiot husband is trying to move up the ranks in a really sleazy air filter and vacuum MLM and it breaks my heart. He thinks he is so slick, but you can really see the desperation in his eyes.
This is my best MLM story. I don’t think I’ve actually told it here, amazingly. So, I was dating a new boy and we scheduled a low key hangout for me to meet all his friends. I was very, very nervous, which he knew. The boy was part of a networking group that for some reason also contained a tupperware salesperson so he invited her to give her spiel during the low key meet the friends hangout. I was (obviously) suuuuper uncomfortable with this and explained the evils of MLMs to him. He shrugged off my concerns and I spent the most awkward afternoon of my life listening to a tupperware saleswoman try to sell overpriced food storage to a bunch of people who had no money. I am disappointed to report that not only did I not break up with him then, I also did not break up with him when he gifted me tupperware and only tupperware for Christmas.
TUPPERWARE?!? Honestly, there needs to be a system where that person is required to put that as a red flag on his dating profile for 5 years or longer if he cannot show that he has reformed.
I am obsessed with sordid MLM tales so seconding the yes please to all the stories
Yesterday someone posted in my city’s subreddit to say that she had been scammed by a bogus craft fair organizer who charged her a stall booking fee for a fake event. Of course people asked her what kind of crafts she does. “Oh I don’t actually do any crafting. I am an independent sales rep for this online clothing company! No it’s NOT a pyramid scheme, you guys, why do you keep saying that? I know so many people who’ve been able to quit their jobs and take their families on exotic vacations with the money they made working for this company!”
scammers scamming scammers, the scamgularity is upon us
it’s turtles scammers all the way down!
https://youtu.be/W9mhsW5aWJM
There was a thread yesterday (on AskMeFi or on reddit/r/relationships, I forget which) by someone whose coworker was inviting their coworkers to their Passion Party (sex toys MLM)…
My cousin just started selling Thirty-One, which I found out when she sent a Facebook invite to her “online selling event”. I clicked around on the website, thinking I’d be a good cousin and maybe find some little thing to buy, but everything was so hideously ugly, and the one thing I liked (a faux? leather tote/laptop bag) was like, $85, and I literally said aloud, “I could buy a cuter one at TJMaxx for $25.”
Then Nicole linked to the MLM story a couple days ago and I went “ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. bullet dodged!”
And then I got a little sad, because my cousin has a full-time job as a physical therapist, but she also has a husband in school and a one-year-old baby, so I’m absolutely certain she took up the Thirty-One stuff to make a little extra cash. I’m hoping she didn’t shell out too much to start 🙁
For me, the worst thing about MLM is that it sort of makes sense historically… but not anymore. The start up costs to getting a product, or line of products, into major retailers can be really big, and there are scenarios where selling at parties or fairs, where you have a bunch of friends sell part time, would have actually made a lot of sense. So if it’s 1970 and you want to get your weird juice into the world, getting your friends, and eventually their friends, to sell it sort of makes sense.
And then the internet happened.
And in our post-internet world, I just don’t understand anymore why people think that the business model is actually anything other than a giant scam.
Dying at the Leslie Jones tweets. “I THOUGHT YALL SAID HE WAS GONNA BE THE OTHER SHOW”
Sometimes she is the funniest woman in the world, and sometimes she says stuff and I really remember what Roxane said about that dating-during-slavery bit from Weekend Update, which wasn’t “this is super offensive” but rather “oh, wow, a lot of her comedy comes from a place of pain” and some of that latter stuff really throws me, but I think she’s super talented and I think she’s going to DECIMATE US in Ghostbusters.
^^All of this. She’s amazing and needs her own show.
My co-worker ran into her in Italy a couple months ago, and Leslie was all “do you want to take a selfie with me?” She (co-worker) says she (Leslie) was very cool in person.
STAR WARS??? I know there is a cocktail hour later but i am just SO EXCITED that there is an ASIAN WOMAN!!! in this film and i kept thinking “that could have been me!!!!!” with joy and a slight twinge of resentment.
and excited about OTHER THINGS about the movie but to be respectful i will not say another word.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
The one thing I will say is that the diversity of the new cast AND minor/background characters was REALLY COOL, like, the people that stand out most in my mind are a black woman and an Asian man and that WARMED MY HEART.
BECHDEL TEST
I was thinking that the whole time. And it did!
Apparently the Asian man was Miles from Lost!!
I KNEW HE LOOKED FAMILIAR thank you!
Great article on Gewndoline Christie here. Includes reference to her Star Wars role, so if you don’t know already who her character is and don’t want to know, don’t click I guess. http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/gwendolin…
WHAT i am not tearing up at this article just like i did not cry at the movie last night
oh my god this picture needs to be shared (no spoilers)
I AM SO HAPPY. I guess I will save my spoiler-y comments for the Open Thread, but I may BURST FROM JOY before then.
keybord motly broken, cn’t relly type but pic needed of pre-movie photobombing…
I have a crush on John Boyega now. It’s happened.
Daisy Ridley, who I have already had a crush on based on her Insta/press junket, has officially replaced Carey Mulligan as the #1 person I would leave my boyfriend for in a heartbeat
I fully support you in this! She was lovely and delightful!
SO. GOOD. I can’t think of a more eloquent description right now because I am very tired. But it was phenomenal.
Also, John Boyega. I knew he would be good after Attack the Block, but my god. He was amazing!!!! He needs to be a massive star, right now.
Also, my fabulous costume was fabulous.
Dangit I can’t get the picture to embed. It’s an R2D2 dress and it is the shit.
https://instagram.com/p/_awz9xgChL/
Oscar Isaac Oscar IsaacOscar IsaacOscar IsaacOscar IsaacOscar IsaacOscar IsaacOscar Isaac!!!!! <3 <3 <3
Also BB8 was even more adorable than I could have possibly imagined.
I am renaming the cats Chewie and BB8.
MrChouffe was definitely calling our big fat white cat BB-8 this morning and it slayed me with adorable.
saffron is even the right colour (no caps with onscreen keyboard) and she burbles just like him.
Plus he and Lupita during the press tour have been THE CUTEST.
Oscar Isaac and anyone during this press junket! I melted over his duet with Daisy (because of course they can all carry a tune)
I want Oscar Isaac in literally every movie ever. And did you know Bill Hader and Jean Ralphio from Parks and Rec kind of did voice work for BB8?
Every time BB8 did anything my husband grabbed my hand and pouted and looked at me and I know he was thinking about how much he wants a baby and/or puppy.
SO GOOD SO GOOD OMG. JOHN BOYEGA IS SO CHARMING. DAISY RIDLEY IS SO CHARMING. NOT ENOUGH PHASMA. I WANT ALL THE BB-8 SHIT.
If I had grown up with Rey’s character, rather than an inherent belief that only guys got to do cool things in sci fi movies, things would be a LOT DIFFERENT, I can tell you that.
I’m so happy and I want to talk about it SO BADLY. come on world, SEE THE MOVIE ALREADY it’s been out for HOURS!
This is the part about the movie that made me cry the hardest: watching Rey DO ALL THE THINGS and thinking about all the girls who get to grow up with that in their mainstream culture. They don’t have to LOOK for her, she’ll be there. Being badass.
AAAAAAH STAR WARS WAS SO GOOD
A Kit and Ace store arrived in Boston and its ads are all over the internet. 100% of the time, seeing the phrase “technical cashmere” leads to a cavalcade of Archer quotes.
So glad to hear Ella and her Tall Man are having a nice holiday together!
Yeah don’t they have one on Newbury and one on Charles St.? Seems a bit overboard to me. And you can tell by the marketing that they’re related to Lululemon… No thank you!!
Oh, my marriage is probably over, because we were watching the “Deborah’s Time” SNL skit from last week and Steve said “you know this is how Sunday in the Park With George sounds to me when you play it in the car, right?”
Also, that was a really good skit! Cecily and Hemmy WENT FOR IT.
I can be your husband.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ducG55pfCMQ
(My own husband goes into a fugue state and self-stims to avoid hearing anything from Sondheim.)
The best revenge against non-theater-people-partners is raising theater kids right out from under them. Let me know if you would like my curriculum on this topic.
My husband can’t stand Sondheim either, but my revenge was to bring up my children to love this stuff. Now he is outnumbered.
Loving the way Santa stretches her back legs when she rests. When she’s full grown she’ll stretch across a room. What a lovely dog she is!
Autocorrect thinks Sansa is Santa. Apologies to the dear puppy!
I am now picturing lady Santa and her wife Mrs. Claus running shit at the North Pole while all the little male elves run around doing their bidding.
The Rebecca Solnit piece was the gospel truth. I got home from barre last night and my husband was watching Taxi Driver. I was like, this movie proves every single piece of her argument.
I did always wonder what “technical cashmere” was. I was hoping it was some kind of synthetic cashmere made from bamboo or something, because the actual cashmere industry in Mongolia is an environmental catastrophe.
(in case you didn’t read that link, the answer to “what does ‘technical cashmere’ mean?” is “nothing”)
Thank you, I was wondering but lazy. And I kind of figured it meant “they are trying to sell it for people who want to use it for athletic purposes or something” because usually that’s what I think when I hear about “technical clothing.”
Yeah kind of except not even that, as it turns out — Kit and Ace’s Technical Cashmere isn’t even good for exercising in.
Somehow I am not surprised. BTW, it’s run by the same family that brought us all Lululemon; the breathless tone of marketing they use is so remarkably similar.
I was walking around a MALL last weekend (*shudder*) with mr.table and he got very excited about wanting a scarf, and then we went on to look at scarves in just about every store we went into, including going into many higher end stores. He settled on wanting a cashmere scarf, but not wanting to pay for an actual cashmere scarf, but, as I’m the fiber expert between the two of us, I suggested that a blend would probably be soft enough to meet his standards….. And we eventually ended up getting a $10 scarf that was a little cashmere and mostly tencel from one of those cart things in the middle of the walking area.
There’d been a BIG sign on the cart about CASHMERE scarves, and $10!!!. And I *knew* they were trying to cash in on the very small % of cashmere, and I was so grateful, because I knew mr.table would be happy with something very soft, and that the word CASHMERE would prime him correctly to love his $10 scarf.
And then THIS PIECE. I was enjoying it so much and then they referenced Barthes and I became convinced that this piece was written just for me.
Called Vantablack (from Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays), it renders three-dimensional objects flat. This material isn’t fit for clothing: it’s too crumbly, too carcinogenic.
I feel like this should inspire a meme complementary to “precious cinnamon roll: too good for this world, too pure”.
Vertical Carbon Nanotube Arrays: too crumbly for our clothing, too carcinogenic.
OK, it’ll be a pretty niche meme.
I think science should let ME decide if I want to risk cancer to wear vantablack. It’s science’s job to tell me the risks; it’s my job to take them.
How would we cut it to make clothes? Our personal lasers?
Manufacture it in [vaguely] body-shaped pieces to start with. Possibly 3D print at home after 3D scanning yourself and 3D modeling your new outfit!
Well, I got this diamond-tipped high-carbon steel router tip for my Dremel, that’d probably do it.
*_______*
Charlie Potato Hashbrowns has been transformed into a lazy fur shoggoth with a hypnotically soft tummy help I can’t stop petting.
I’ve given myself several cricks in the neck craning my head to look at this photo from all possible angles, and I still don’t know what part of the dog this is. Is that a paw or an ear or his tail in the bottom right? Is he lying on his side or his back? This is a very confusing pile of fluff.
I’m guessing the golden thing is his collar, which means the small roundish black thing immediately to the left of the red splotch may well be his nose. So his head is turned to the right while he’s lying on his back, his front paws in the air–left paw right above the human hand–and his tail and back legs stretching across the human’s jeans. His face is obscured by his right front paw and leg.
You might think this would not be a comfortable position, but some dogs actually FALL ASLEEP in it.
I never get over that name.
I want you to know that for my spouse and I, the mere existence of a shaggy fluffy dog named Charlie Potato Hashbrowns is enough to brighten up our day.
It is a well known phenomenon. Dog evolution long ago included magnetism. It proved so beneficial that magnetic dogs have been the norm for so long that we shortened the species name to “dogs”.
So it’s not your fault. Tell your work supervisor you are stuck and cannot get free.
Sandy Hook “truthers” are absolute garbage of the garbageiest sort.
Guys, the wife of my husband’s bandmate is a Sandy Hook truther. We were talking about the San Bernadino shooting and then BAM she busts out with all this crazy conspiracy “Obama wants to disarm the whole country to leave us weak and ready for takeover, those kids didn’t die, they hired actors to play their parents, how come there were no witnesses blah blah blah” I didn’t even know such a thing EXISTED until two weeks ago. Cue *homer-slowly-backing-into-shrub-dot-gif*
I can’t ever sit in on band practice again. Not that it’s a huge loss or anything.
O-O
My feeling exactly.
I mean aside from the fact that these people are human garbage, do they not realize that it’s been three years since Sandy Hook and nothing about gun control has changed so even if it was a hoax it didn’t work?
I am related to a lot of people who believe some truly stupid things about Obama trying to take away their guns and how the only reason he hasn’t been impeached is because of his race (???), but even they have never dared to suggest that Sandy Hook wasn’t real. It takes a really special combination of stupid, crazy, and evil to suggest such a thing. I’m guessing logic isn’t a big factor here.
Though the fact that it didn’t work is a pretty good indicator it was a government project!
This is a new one to me, too, and it’s absolutely appalling. If Obama’s really coming for everyone’s guns he needs to hurry the hell up. I’m assuming he’s not like a gun stealing version of Santa Claus and it’s going to require more than one night. But regardless of that, I cannot begin to imagine the pain of being a parent and having your small child killed in that manner and then a few years later being told that it wasn’t real.
Hell, they don’t wait. I saw some truthers going after the boyfriend of the reporter who was shot on-air in Virginia a few months ago, a week or less after it happened.
THANK YOU
Are they sure that new blacker-than-black is really black, or just very very very very dark blue?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8VFecEzkgk
“Oh Jesse be free babe go make boxes boo go make boxes. ”
…those Leslie Jones tweets are so supremely relatable, oh man.
Crying with joy for Ella and Tall Man. If anyone, anywhere, ever deserves a happy ending and merry Christmas, it’s those two.
But what the heck with the lipstick advertising? I don’t get it.
She writes a weekly(ish) column about lipstick and also life! You can find the others in the Pool archives.
I highly recommend reading the archives, which details their whole story and explains the lipstick bit. It’s kind of a metaphor.
I wish I had the cash to burn on Hamilton tickets, because if it existed it would be burnt posthaste, and rise again as a phoenix of Hamiltonia. Alas, these damn kids “need” preschool. Maybe this summer.
Maybe you could just sneak them back stage and let them learn about theater for a few months instead?
So, it is looking the Feds have got a basically airtight case against Martin Shkreli, whose reputation as a brilliant stock wunderkind short seller was — quelle motherfucking surprise — actually a Ponzi scheme. (It’s almost like the idea of brilliant stock wunderkind short sellers is actually a pernicious delusion nurtured by a corrupt financial industry in order to justify its reckless behavior!)
There’s probably a good HOT TAKE about how much easier it is for the law to come down on Shkreli for cheating rich people out of their money than it is to come down on him for cheating poor people out of their medicine, but honestly, what else is there to say?
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-17/…
A good part about the Wu-Tang Clan album at the end there:
“The government regularly auctions seized property to raise cash, so perhaps some other rich private buyer will end up owning the album. Perhaps it is cursed and brings an indictment for securities fraud to whoever possesses it. But nothing requires the government to auction it; the Justice Department could release the album for free so that we can all enjoy this part of our cultural patrimony. Or for all I know it could just hand it over to Joe Biden.”
I really, really like how the US attorney’s last name is Capers.
please please please hand it over to uncle joe.
he deserves it tbh
He really, really does.
I somehow have complete faith that he is the true rightful owner, it was always meant to be his, so it was written in the stars
oh my god why do I love him so much
I love him with the fervent warmth of coming into the kitchen after finding a lost calf in a rainstorm. Dry clothes, tea, sitting down = Joe Biden
FBI’s New York office tweeted that they didn’t have seizure warrant, so no Wu Tang Clan album, and someone retweeted “You had one job!” Pretty excellent day on Twitter, all around.
Yeah, they might still end up taking it if its found that it was purchased with illegally-acquired money if there’s a clawback after the sentencing, I think.
(Assuming that he gets convicted, which, you know.)
They might take it anyway, for that juicy restitution.
I think that they totally could have justified seizing it to see if he’d replaced the real CD with one of him muttering aloud to himself as he planned his cons. Boom, justified.
Biden only has a tape player in his sweet Camaro, so I don’t know how he’s going to listen to that Wu Tang album.
He’s got a guy that can do conversions. Guy still owes him for the extra Bubba Kush Biden slipped him last time they hung out.
Check out this fascinating Reddit post about the fandom situation that spawned Fifty Shades of Grey.
I mean, porn for Twilight was pretty decent up until the last book, where Meyer jossed her own canon and got Bella pregnant. Now there were all these weird biological ‘variables’ authors had to consider. Did Edward have to wear a condom in our fics for her to not get pregnant (no one waned her to get pregnant)? And if he did, wouldn’t his super vampire venom/semen just burst right through the sucker? And if so, wouldn’t Bella be at risk of ‘turning’ into a vampire anyway?
That’s not a good time. Having to consider all that dumb shit was frankly awkward. It was fun for a few months (DOES THE JIZZ SPARKLE?!), until we all realized that Meyer was a moron who knew nothing about even human anatomy. By that point, everyone was just frustrated. we just wanted to create and consume some fucking porn, give us a break.
Sadly, what they got was … not good porn. At least, Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t sound like good porn to me.
The poster goes on to explain that FSOG did not explode because it was good–it exploded because E. L James was skilled at marketing the fic.
OK, so I read those fics listed and many others! I already knew that whole story! All the drama. All the hate. Man.
Anyway, I can vouch it’s 100% accurate, what she’s saying. The whole thing, in retrospect, is incredibly dumb, but I tell you what, those stories, bad as they were (some of them), got me through some bad times. I would’ve gone crazy without them, is what I’m saying. I read somewhere that the most popular book read by people during kidney dialysis is Fifty Shades and I totally, totally get that. Sometimes, only the lizard part of your brain is available to input and it’s nice when it’s not pain that’s being input, but something else (horrible as it was).
So yeah, memories!
yeah, I have absolutely read a ton of shitty & problematic porn in the search of More Fanfic to distract myself from whatever, it’s just that none of those were then turned into multimillion franchises of their own.
I can think of dozens and dozens of fics that actually deserve to be multithousand dollar if not multimilliondollar franchises well well before FSOG does.
There’s a short handful of fics I’ve read that should be published novels. Like, to the point where I’m genuinely sad about it, because they’re just so good it feels like the world is being cheated.
There’s also just some really excellent pornographic writing out there.
this seems a good place to recommend Luminosity http://luminous.elcenia.com/, which is a really thoughtful and well-written AU of Twilight in which the only different factor to the original set-up is that Bella is a hyper-rational and hyper-self-aware character. The author manages to make the universe more consistent and satisfying than Meyer ever could have done, and it’s funny without being nastily parodic.
I do think it’s so interesting when fandom develops as a work is being created, and you can identify the points when the creator introduces a surprising new factor which fans have to choose to accept, expanding their concept of what the work is, or reject for whatever reason. It does seem to say something about Twilight that that point came pretty early on.
I loved Luminosity so much! It worked really well as a companion piece to the Less Wrong posts explaining the concept, because it produced vivid modeling of how the techniques can be deployed.
Thank you for this link! I’m really enjoying this AU 🙂
I’ve read that thread several times, and it’s just incredible. Of all the ways FSoG could have been created, “as a cynical marketing scheme spawned by someone conning Twilight fandom by ripping off their AUs” is not one that ever crossed my mind.
I’ve clearly been in fandom for too long, because that’s all I ever thought it was.
(Ask me about my feelings about Cassandra Clare sometime.)
Can I ask? I keep hearing ugh, Cassie Clare rumblings, but I don’t quite know–wait, there was something about plagiarism, right? I think I read some exhaustive account of all the plagiarism evidence, but I don’t really understand what was going on in the fandom.
there is so much about Cassie Claire and most of it is lost to friend locks and no-bots.txt and journalfen (RIP)
BUT I think the relevant things here are the way she got her fans to give her so many presents and so on but treated people like shit if they were remotely critical of her, or she otherwise couldn’t use them. and she was also horrible about when her fanfic-turned-original series was in movie production, but i don’t remember the details on it 🙁
I am, in fact, so glad you asked. (I have a lot of feelings.)
1) There was totally plagiarism – about 3-4 pages lifted directly out of an obscure 80’s fantasy novel, but with the names changed. This was several dozen chapters deep into her epic Draco Dormiens series, so I don’t know if she figured no one would notice or only her rabid fans were still reading and would care, but people noticed, and they cared.
(Side note, I am still mad at John Scalzi for insisting that it was just fanfiction so it doesn’t matter. You are normally an intelligent and insightful guy, John Scalzi, but in this instance, you need to shut the fuck up.)
2) Drama. Queen. We talk about BNFs in fandom – I don’t know how in fandom you are – Big Name Fans, who get recognition and adoration and whatever they want just for asking for it. “Getting a laptop” was pretty diagnostic of BNFs, and I don’t know if that came from Cassie Clare’s reputation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. You also have to understand that sending money on the internet was not a Thing then – Paypal existed, but it was new, not to mention fandom skews young – and the discussion about what you could accept money for in fandom was very fraught. Basically, you couldn’t ask, but you could imply, and she did a lot of implying, and a lot of making it easy for people to buy her things and send her money, and that was very much frowned upon in a lot of circles.
3) Ever heard of FictionAlley, the big Harry Potter fanfiction archive? That was Cassie Clare’s project. She had to start it, you see, because she got her account suspended on fanfiction.net (which was pretty much the only centralized archive at the time) for the plagiarism. And then a bunch of her friends started getting aggressive about defending her, and some of them got their accounts suspended, and some of them left in a show of support, and they all needed someplace to post their fic, and FictionAlley was born – and from that, the Inner Circle and the incredible cliquishness of mid- to late- Harry Potter fandom. (Which was its own shitshow, believe me.)
I was writing a writing-advice column for ff.n at the time, and I still have the email folder full of hate mail I got about the whole thing. Because mine was a visible account, I guess, despite having nothing to do with the running of the actual site, possibly I am still bitter about this. But still. Reams of hate mail.
4) She was supposedly somehow connected to the MsScribe Saga, which is impossible even to sum up here, but let’s leave it at: Drama. (If you like drama, do make yourself a drink and a bowl of popcorn and settle in with that link, it is a drama goldmine)
I think what really burns me up is how she’s managed to become successful and for the most part leave all this drama behind her, and people act like because it was “only fandom” the plagiarism shouldn’t matter. It’s not like she was twelve and didn’t know what she was doing; none of her defenses even vaguely measure up. But you can bet that when the City of Bones movie flopped, I spent all day mentally rewriting “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” and feeling mildly petty.
Way more info than you could ever, EVER, want or need:
http://failfandomanonwiki.pbworks.com/w/page/4641…
well I for one am definitely not crying at work about an old man and his old cats
Currently trying to find a way to sneak it into my company’s social media calendar, must find way to make it on-brand.
“I hasten to add that I don’t think I’m injured by these guys at this point in my life, and I don’t feel sorry for myself. I just goggle in amazement at the batshit that comes out of them; it’s like I’m running a laboratory and they keep offering up magnificent specimens. ”
From the Rebecca Solnit piece. I think The toast is another such laboratory.
I’m weirdly interested in the chair the the LW’s ex has “always wanted”. Is it a super fancy chair? A very comfortable chair? One of those ones with a cooler in the arm?
Could be from a particular designer. There are specific mid-century chairs that my dad covets.
I mentally picture it as one of those folding fabric chairs with beer holders that says “#1 Ex” on the back and nobody is going to convince me otherwise
I would also like to know. I immediately decided it was *my* dream chair, which starts around $5k, and therefore I cannot imagine anyone buying one for an ex. But maybe it’s just a folding chair from IKEA that he wanted! The people must know. (She shouldn’t buy it for him anyway; that ship, as it were, has sailed. Sorry bro; no chair for you.)
Not gonna lie: some part of me wants this 14 thousand dollar chunk of limestone for no reason but to have it.
A+ life goal
I love it. Warm like a heated mattress pad, but it’s a chair! You can keep it outside! So cozy.
I’m picturing a chair he’s wanted since childhood- so obviously either a beanbag chair or an inflatable chair.
It’s a Ron Swanson.
I want Swanson chairs so bad. Not Offerman chairs, talented as he is. Swanson chairs.
Same here! I want more details.
I randomly found the Chair of My Dreams at a Burlington Coat Factory a couple of years ago, after years of longing. (It’s super-soft and brown and fuzzy and rocks and has a matching rocking ottoman).
This 12 year old Sikh boy from Texas got put in a juvenile detention facility for 3 DAYS because him and/or a bunch of kids made a joke about him carrying a bomb in his backpack. He wasn’t allowed to call his parents either apparently. http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-b…
Also an elderly sikh man on a flight who was sleeping was filmed and made fun of online for being “osama”
AND a sikh store clerk got called terrorist and then got shot in the face. https://www.rt.com/usa/326360-sikh-clerk-terroris…
so YAY for humanity. You can find me crying in a fetal position under my bed.
Oh God. I just finished the Men Explain Lolita article and the one from yesterday about the bogus false reporting charges and I’m not sure I can handle all the horror that is in the world.
“Sooner or later we all buy furniture for someone we used to sleep with” is a life milestone I didn’t even know I was working toward but will now accept as a personal crusade for some reason, thx Mallory
I have given and sold old furniture to two exes now. Mallory is so wise.
Well, I mean, not all of us. Not that I’m averse to buying furniture, but, um…
Hey, uh, how about that Star Wars movie, right????
Why am I not surprised that the Sandy Hook truther is from Florida?
I’m now imagining a theatre company clothing all their stagehands in viperblack, for the ultimate in magically-invisible set changes.
Y’all, I took Mulder’s cone off and he promptly gnawed on my arm (and, in this pic, the cable to my headset while I was on a conference call). Sadly, he began over-licking his junk and the cone had to go back on for a while. Probably another day or two.
It Happened To Me: One of my parents’ friends is a Sandy Hook truther. So I was just sitting in the back yard at a party, minding my own damn business, and she starts talking to me about how it probably never happened and is a gun-grabbing conspiracy.
The dial blew straight past “fight” to “flight.” Like “how might i fake my own death and get away from this woman.”
I just… I don’t get it. Have they seen any evidence that the government is trying to take their guns away?
Also – What did you end up doing? I have several insane relatives who have actually boxed me into corners at parties to spew their various theories, so I’m always looking for creative ways out.
i ended up latching onto the word “conspiracy” and pivoting to something related to aliens or other x-files type things. and thankfully at that point someone else jumped into the conversation so i could escape and freshen the drink that i had just panic-gulped.
it really helps that this woman is nothing to me. were someone i care about to start talking like this, i’m not sure what i would do. other than feel adrift and sad and like everything is not much good.
I’m impressed with your quick thinking!
if my years of Talking To Men have taught me anything, it’s how to minimize, dismiss, redirect, escape.
I only recently realized that this instinct has been hardwired into me. I was in an uncomfortable situation and laughed heartily as if the uncomfortable statement were a joke, changed the subject to a much lighter joke-related topic, and eventually fled and a friend said that was well-done. And my response was “oh…yeah, it’s what I do in bars if men talk to me.”
I would like to think that, were I put in this situation, I would interrupt a truther to say, “You sound like an imbecile at best and I refuse to hear another word of your nonsense,” but more likely I would widen my eyes, thin my lips, and silently beg for mercy.
I have not seen one of these people in real life, but I’m afraid I would be unable to stop myself from truly reprehensible behavior. The brother of a friend was killed in the Aurora shooting, and if someone tried to tell me he was a crisis actor, I would LOSE. IT.
they look *eerily* like everyone else. 🙁
and i’m so sorry about your friend’s brother. [all the sad emoticons]
This is obviously nowhere on par with Sandy Hook truthers, but I was recently at an academic conference where this woman – a PhD candidate at Princeton, mind you – started telling everyone about how there are too many Mexicans in California and poor people in the States just use food stamps to buy booze (???) because they are lazy. It was so incredibly inappropriate and stupid that I just didn’t know what to say at all? I thought she was joking for a second. Mind you, I know not all educated people are smart, by any means, but generally the academic world discourages that kind of thinking. I felt really bad because it was an international conference and we were two of the few Americans there. I honestly didn’t know what to do in that situation… I just kept clarifying for the others in the conversation that literally everything she was saying about the US was wrong (although I’m sure they could tell that.) You don’t want to start a fight, necessarily, in a professional situation like that… just boggling.
omg, that is so tonally clueless, in addition to being generally clueless.
also: “I just kept clarifying for the others in the conversation that literally everything she was saying about the US was wrong”: dude, YES. fact-checking someone out loud and in real time, A+
Apparently Mother Jones managed to get their hands on the FBI file on Pete Seeger, and wow is that an interesting read! I’m only a part of the way through it now, but dang:
Dear Sirs –
I felt shocked, outraged, and disgusted to read that the California American Legion voted to 1) deport all Japanese after the war, citizen or not, 2) Bar all Japanese descendants from citizenship!!
We, who may have to give our lives in this great struggle—we’re fighting precisely to free the world of such Hitlerism, such narrow jingoism.
If you deport Japanese, why not Germans, Italians, Rumanians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians?
If you bar from citizenship descendants of Japanese, why not descendants of English? After all, we once fought with them too.
America is great and strong as she is because we have so far been a haven to all oppressed.
I felt sick at heart to read of this matter.
Yours truly,
Pvt. Peter Seeger
I am writing also to the Los Angeles Times.
It’s pretty amazing to me the kind of stuff that could get you an FBI file up until, like, fifteen years ago.
In my grandfather’s case, (1) teaching Russian and (2) having a beard.
Such a great letter! I’ve always loved his music, so that makes me extra happy to listen to it. Sick at heart indeed.
In other news, Gawker continues to be the worst: http://gawker.com/this-hamilton-shit-has-really-g…
I hate-clicked on that knowing full well I’d roll my eyes out of my head and NOPE out of it.
Well, I was right. Oh, Gawker. You used to be at least somewhat fun and now you’re just an asshole.
I like how they made some announcement about going to gossip rehab after that horrible outing article, and they haven’t followed through even a bit. Also Hamilton Nolan is the worst kind of over-ironic bore.
The commenters are just as bad. Someone is over there asking if Lin-Manuel Miranda’s name is ‘a parody of millennial names’. No, dude. Just the name of someone who isn’t white.
I really liked HamNo better when he was all about the SUPER SQUATS.
I would totally read a piece about why Hamilton’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but that crap was no more erudite than a schoolyard “nuh-uh!”
how do you get so utterly mental that you wind up harassing the parents of dead kids for faking the whole thing because reasons and appear sane and capable enough to become a tenured professor, I feel like those should be mutually incompatible things. Either you’re raving and chewing the scenery about how every noteworthy event in American history was staged by the Illuminati to control the sheeple, or you’re gradually working your way up to an authority on communications in the deeply insular world of academia, there’s not a lot of middle ground for moonlighting there
RIGHT??? Like, has he had the judgement to avoid talking about how Obama hired child actors to portray murder victims in front of his colleagues and students, yet somehow lacked it when it came to harrassing the families? What was the thought process here?
Sanity is not, and has never been, a requirement for tenure.
I was coming to say this – I think with the current state of academia and higher education, being slightly unhinged may actually give you an advantage. Or at least having very out-of-whack priorities.
Maybe he was sane-ish when he got tenure and has since been kicked in the head by a horse?
I used to work for a professor who had done a lot of research into how people learn, and when he was talking about how teachers can help students learn topics they may find challenging to their belief system (he always used evolution as his example) there are a few things teachers can do to try and make it easier, but ultimately if the student doesn’t want to accept the challenging fact, their brain will make any leap of logic necessary to allow them to maintain their belief system.
I first heard this talk from him over a decade ago and remember immediately thinking “oh, this explains most right wingers ” and it has only gotten so much worse – probably because there’s so much more evidence that they are wrong.
Nicole – you are this person, right?!?! https://thebillfold.com/giving-the-gift-of-hamilt… I mean of course, you don’t have to say if it is you either way, but I’ll just be over here thinking, The Toast is the best place in the world.
…Yep, definitely Nicole.
This is probably mean of me to say, but James Tracy looks exactly like what I’d picture upon hearing the words “Sandy Hook truther.” It’s just something about the face.
Also, unrelated to everything in the link roundup, but I have been waiting for The Girl King to leak online for MONTHS and it FINALLY HAS and all is right with the world. Sorry Carol, but you just don’t compare.
Personally I think the Iraq War was a government conspiracy to seize our weapons of mass destruction.
I think it was an old white man conspiracy to make the world a shittier place through unchecked spending of money on mercenaries, arms, and dubious allies, while diverting money away from things that actually help others, and fueling an endless stream of fear that undermines civil society, not to mention terrorists seeking revenge. If they can’t have total domination, they’ll destabilize the whole damn world so no one can have nice things.
I’m not sure I’d say he’s a -dedicated- Sandy Hook truther but after literally every mass shooting or terrorist incident it’s simply a matter of time before my dad starts posting links on Facebook about it being a false flag attack perpetrated by the CIA or whatever. Did you know there are already San Bernardino conspiracy theorists as well? *cry*
Aaaaand that’s why I had to unfollow my dad on Facebook.
You made the right call. I believe firmly that not all family members (or even friends!) are meant to be FB friends.
I spent a week in a particular part of rural Campeche two years ago doing fieldwork. We got to stay in the family’s old house, which had tile floors and a toilet you flushed with a bucket from the rain barrel. Incidentally, it was the rainy sseason, and on our first lovely outing the ethnologist got the truck stuck in the mud and we wore that mud all week. But our host had a modern house and we were very grateful that she made aqua fresca in large quantities in the 100 degree 100 % humidity. Im a daughter of 70’s Tupperware parties, but there we were with no running water, and she had the largest Tupperware container I have ever seen. It was at least a 3 gallon one. She was a Maya Tupperware lady.
At this very moment, I am losing my shit and have texted all of my friends who are doing other things and therefore The Toast will receive all of my insanity.
So, we’re likely to move to Connecticut. We can move anywhere in the state we want, though some of the folks at the company suggest Hartford would be a good home base. That’s where we have been focusing our efforts. The trouble is that there isn’t much of the kind of work I do in the Hartford area. There are things sort of adjacent and I can make a case for them, but nothing directly correlating.
Today, I stumbled across a position directly correlating at one of the premiere institutions of it’s kind. The catch is that the job would be in NYC, which necessitates living in the most expensive part of CT so I can commute some ungodly amount to the city every day.
Plus: SUPER EXCITED ABOUT THE POSITION! It’s a great job, and I had to tell my current job because we have close ties with that institution.
Boo: The commute and cost of living in Fairfield County is sort of brutal. We *just* make over six figures, and spending $1M on a house is kind of out of the question for us.
Is CT-adjacent NY an option? I live in Putnam County, about half an hour from Danbury; it’s much more affordable here, and there’s lots of transportation options to NYC.
Me and a roommate once adopted a cat that way. He was outdoors far too often (especially since he was declawed in the front–something we would never ever do) and was really friendly, so when we saw the neighbors packing up to move we asked "are you taking Max with you?" "Why, do you two want him?" YES PLEASE.
Can I get on your list of Hamilton soundtrack recipicents? I am trying to work it into my afterholiday budget. I am sitting here now with my sweet cat, who is maybe 1/3 or less Sansa weight, and I am totally a cat person, though I do sort of care about my sister’s pugs. I have knit them sweaters!
BUT I LOVE SANSA. I WILL KNIT SANSA A SWEATER
though since she is growing so fast it would be be best to wait a bit. Next August/september she will probably be her grown weight, right? I will plan for that.
Can I get on your list of Hamilton soundtrack recipicents? I am trying to work it into my afterholiday budget. I am sitting here now with my sweet cat, who is maybe 1/3 or less Sansa weight, and I am totally a cat person, though I do sort of care about my sister's pugs. I have knit them sweaters!
BUT I LOVE SANSA. I WILL KNIT SANSA A SWEATER
though since she is growing so fast it would be be best to wait a bit. Next August/september she will probably be her grown weight, right? I will plan for that.