ThePrettiestOne

author: Mallory Ortberg
name: Jen
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2016/09/07
date added: 2016/09/07
shelves:
review:

iamianbrooks:

theonion:

Gay Conversion Therapists Claim Most Patients Fully Straight By The Time They Commit Suicide 

Sometimes the Onion writers wake up in the morning and decide they will not be fucking around with anything that day

winterlandwitch:

“When youre older youll want kids,” they said.

I stare at my feilds of goats, my endless feilds of goats. They were right.

trapqueenkoopa:

dayumshecangetit:

fedupblackwoman:

This young black woman was killed because she refused to dance with a man at Juve .#sayhername

“Why don’t y'all just say no”
“Just walk away”
“Y'all don’t have to fake it/lie to guys”

This just in: don’t ever do anything at all with a man or specifically without one, you could die.

thecaffeinatedautistic:

wingedcatgirl:

beecups:

Why isn’t using sign language more common in society? like??? Not even just communicating within deaf communities but for everybody to use with anybody?

I feel like this should be standard learning material for those working in loud workplaces or with machinery, or maybe idk for talking underwater or when someone else can’t hear you at a concert. Or what about when somebody is having a panic attack and can’t talk, or just isn’t all that comfortable with voicing their feelings?

Why isn’t nonverbal communication more integrated into our society? Cause it should be.

#I mean the answer is ‘because Alexander Graham Bell’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell#Work_with_the_deaf

Several influential people of the time, including Bell, viewed deafness as something that should be eradicated, and also believed that with resources and effort they could teach the deaf to speak and avoid the use of sign language, thus enabling their integration within the wider society from which many were often being excluded.^[64]

y i k e s

I’m actually really glad someone read my quick tags on that post. Because lots of people don’t have a clue about this stuff.

Can I get a redo

ijustwanttoblogaboutsu:

This was such a great message.

adulthoodisokay:

Wow, Merriam-Webster just murdered a senior editor at Slate.

metapianycist:

metapianycist:

the “lol triggered” meme is only considered funny in a society where mentally ill people are devalued. it relies on a context where mentally ill people’s needs are considered ridiculous.

additional fact: the meme has made mentally ill people afraid to use the word trigger with their doctors and therapists. it’s literally making mentally ill people less able to access care. defending this meme, with that knowledge, is blaming mentally ill ppl for being hurt by ableism.

For “Soy Yo,” Bomba Estereo’s popular single about thriving in tough times, the Colombian band put out a plea to their fans to submit video ideas. The winners were a team of Danish directors whose idea was shot in Brooklyn—the same Latinx area of Williamsburg as CL’s recent one , too—and goddamn, are they ever winners.

Read more...

During the early 2000s, ‘Scrubs’ was one of the funniest shows on TV. Here’s a reminder of all the moments that made it great…

The post 24 Moments From ‘Scrubs’ That Will Remind You the Show Was Hilarious appeared first on Pleated-Jeans.com.

hanginggardenstories:

THE MYTH OF BEAUTIFUL GIRLS by Natalie C. Parker

The masks are not for my protection, but theirs.

I am the most beautiful girl who has ever lived. This, I have been told since the day I turned ten and came to my birthday party dressed for the first time in the red of a young lady. Instead of cheering and open arms, I was greeted by gasps and startled cries. Everyone from my own father to the good Lady Anat drew their hands to their faces and turned swiftly away. I thought perhaps my older brothers had come up behind me in some gruesome livery for the occasion and the crowd played along. But there was no one behind me, and my mother led me from the crowd and locked me in my room.

The next time she came to me, she wore an exquisite mask of gold and bone. The lips were bowed in a delicate frown, one hollow eye dripping jewel teardrops down a smooth cheek. Through the holes of those eyes, her own were a watery brown as she explained that I would be allowed to leave my rooms as soon as everyone in town had been fitted with a mask of their own. I wondered when I would receive mine, and she explained that my face was too lovely to ever bear such a blight.

“But why should you cover your face when it is mine that is too beautiful?” I asked.

“My daughter, my gift,” she began, her voice muffled by the mask. “When a beautiful girl such as you is born, the price of her beauty is steep. Anyone who looks at you will love you, that is the truth. They will not be able to help themselves, and it will not hurt you. Your beauty is a blessing on all of us. But when you love, the object of your love will not be able to bear it. Your love will kill any single mortal who tries to receive it.”

It has been eight years since I have seen the face of my mother, my father, my priest, my childhood friends.

When I leave my home, I pass through streets and markets filled with masks in every color and shape. Their expressions ever the same—frozen grins and frowns and grimaces and neutral lips—I see their lives in the small nicks and scratches that collect along the surface, in missing jewels and fresh carvings. I know Theia by the sheaf of wheat that bends along her left cheek as though pressed in a constant wind, and I know Pax by the crescent moon point of his chin, the sharp plunge of his forever-smile.

I don’t remember when masks became more real to me than faces. I tried again and again to recall the faces from my childhood. At night, when the only distraction was the silver moonlight on my damask bed sheets, I would focus on the memory of my mother. She had lips that pinched whenever I raised my voice too high, skin paler than my own with freckles splashed across her forehead like galaxies, or, was that only the speckled paint of her mask? The more time passed, the more the two images began to blend until I could no longer remember if the dip I saw in the chin of her mask was reflected in the bones beneath.

It’s easier than you might think, living in a town of masked faces. You can learn everything you need to know about a person by the width of their stance or the roll of their shoulders or the tilt of their head. Most like to stare from a distance. Their masks like shields between us until, having their met fill or their limit, they turn away without a word. Some turn their eyes to the ground when I come near. Others keep their faces straight ahead, determined to proceed as though I don’t exist at all.

Sometimes that seems the truest response.

I thought I should always be alone—a living shrine to something only others understood. How could I comprehend beauty when the only face I ever saw was my own?  Few spoke to me. Too afraid that I might fall in love with the sound of their voice or the cadence of their speech. At least, that is as mother explained it to me. People are so afraid of the possibility of my love, they prefer to never know me in the slightest.

Except for Theia and Pax. They were never afraid of me and I could see it plainly. It was in the easy way Pax stood with one hand resting on his hip, the way Theia’s head tipped toward me when others tended to tip away. We became friends when no one else was looking. Theia’s fingers curling between my own beneath the table, Pax’s shoulder brushing mine when we walked through the old ruins behind the market.

But it has been eight years since I’ve seen a face other than my own. When I look in the mirror, I see the same eyes and nose and chin that everyone else sees, but I feel no love.

On the night of my eighteenth birthday, I wait until the household is quiet, until the only sound I hear is the hollow song of a tawny owl. Then, I climb from my bed, slip my feet into the soft leather boots father gave me, and pull my packed bag from beneath the bed. It takes no time to escape my house and even less to race to the old ruins behind the market.

“Reanna!” My name called out sharply in Pax’s urgent tenor. “Reanna, wait! Don’t leave!”

I cannot ignore his plea. I drop my bag to the ground and wait for him and for Theia who races at his side. “How did you know?” I ask.

Theia drags my bag through the dirt, putting it behind her. “It was all over your face today. When you said goodbye, we just knew. So we decided to wait for you.”

“My face,” I repeat. How can I still discover ways to feel dissatisfied with it? “That is why I must leave. I can’t force this town to live like this. Not forever.”

Pax steps in front of me, resting one hand on my shoulder. Moonlight glints over the curve of his crescent chin. “We understand, we aren’t trying to stop you.”

Now, Theia moves to his side, the wheat bending over her cheek full of motion even as we stand still. She says, “But you must take us with you.”

I step back. Their hands fall away as I shake my head. “It isn’t fair to either of you. A lifetime behind those masks? I must go alone.”

“You don’t understand,” Pax begins.

“The masks stay here,” Theia adds.

“But I will love you,” I say, suddenly afraid. “I will love you both and you will die.”

“We don’t think so.” Pax moves close to me once more. “The myth says no single mortal can bear your love.”

Theia joins him so that we are a closed circle beneath an open sky. She says, “But we are two mortals, and we love you too much not to try.”

I cannot speak. All I can do is breathe and watch as they remove their masks and I finally understand beauty.

---

Natalie C. Parker is the author of the Southern Gothic duology Beware the Wild, which was a 2014 Junior Library Guild Selection, and Behold the Bones (HarperTeen). She is also the editor of Three Sides of a Heart, a young adult anthology on love triangles publishing from HarperTeen in 2017. She is the founder of Madcap Retreats, an organization offering a yearly calendar of writing retreats and workshops.

Learn more about her: Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram | Website

jumpingjacktrash:

idiopathicsmile:

one time i was hanging out with these two friends of mine, women i admire very much, and we reached this twilight zone moment where we realized that each of us had, at one point:

• dated a man who treated us very badly
  
• and for whom we made many sacrifices
  
• and who we defended to our friends
  
• because we needed to be supportive
  
• of his “genius”
  
• yes, he treated us badly but he was so smart and talented that maybe it was unfair to expect him to play by society’s rules, we told ourselves
  
• and it felt kind of embarrassing to demand something as gauche as kindness (ugh) or maturity
  
• from a “genius”
  
• we lived in fear of being The Nagging Girlfriend/Wife Who Doesn’t Understand Her Man’s Unique Vision. 
  
• you know, the woman from the first half of any biopic about a great man. the first wife, the one he divorces before act two.
  
• instead we dreamed of being The Good, Supportive Girlfriend/Wife Who Knows Sometimes You Must Make Compromises. 
  
• you know, the woman from the later half of any biopic about a great man. the second or sometimes third wife, depending on how long he lived or how many affairs he had.
  

it was genuinely chilling, because the longer we talked, the more it felt like all three of us had been handed the same invisible and very detailed script. we are all extremely liberal feminists and yet we’d still bought the whole narrative hook line and sinker, and i don’t think any of us fully realized how fucked up it was until we heard it from each other’s mouths. 

i should note, maybe, that these two friends of mine are two of the most brilliant, talented, competent people i know. they were, in both cases, just as brilliant as the boy they sacrificed for. also they were, in both cases, capable of maintaining this brilliance while still tending to their own needs like an adult and treating the people around them with a fundamental level of respect.

so in case it helps anyone out there right now, struggling white knuckled to last into the second half of an imagined Great Man biopic: there is no level of intelligence or skill high enough to exempt a man (or a woman or anyone anywhere else on the gender spectrum) from the basic requirements of human decency. i don’t care if he is moving shit around with the power of his mind like matilda, he still has to say “please” and “thank you” and consider the feelings of the people around him. if he cannot or will not do these things, he is not a genius, he is a baby. AT BEST.

also, you are not the love interest of this movie. you are the fucking protagonist.

you are not the love interest of this movie. you are the fucking protagonist.

zinge:

prochoice-or-gtfo:

refinery29:

Watch: This powerful new series highlights the ways abortion providers save and improve women’s lives

Gifs: Planned Parenthood

Abortion providers are trained to recognize patients who are not entirely sure about their decision so that they can encourage them to think more on it before performing the procedure. They also look out for people who are being forced into abortions. Do they catch every single one? No, but they catch as many as they can so that those patients don’t make the wrong choice for themselves. I’m so glad that the woman in this video was able to talk with a doctor who understood that abortion wasn’t what she really wanted.

I get really tired of hearing about how abortion is just a money maker for doctors, when there are so many stories like these about doctors who look out for people like this woman. Doctors only want to perform abortions on patients who are absolutely 100% sure that it’s for them.
-V

Choice.

via r/getmotivated (one of the non-toxic and actually supportive parts of Reddit that is so often eclipsed by the toxic garbage fire part of Reddit that is louder.)

joshreads:

definitely the facial expression you’d have while being browbeat by a guy who learned how to argue on forbes dot com

“It’s anecdotal, but I regularly see Frankenstein’s monster described as a warning against scientific hubris, an alarum about Tampering With Things That Should Be Left Alone™. This I think is quite wrong: I think it is a story about what happens when one fails the (still at the time of writing) radical enlightenment by failing to take social responsibility for one’s actions and interventions. If it’s a warning, it’s a warning about turning one’s back, out of cowardice, on what one creates, not about creating it in the first place.”

- China Mieville, interview with the Weird Fiction Review
(via brotticelli)

andreashettle:

brainhearingjumble:

I don’t know if this is the original source for this image but it was the closest I could get. But it shows different disorders that could go hand and hand with APD. 

[For people who cannot see the image: It shows a large bubble in the middle saying “Auditory processing difficulties” and has many smaller bubbles around the rim slightly overlapping it, the smaller bubbles say, “ODD, SID, Specific Learning Difficulties, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Anxiety, Tourette’s, OCD, Developmental Co-ordination Disorder, Gifted, ADD, Depression, ADHD.” End image description @image-descriptions]

One major disability missing here is deaf and hard of hearing people. We are much more likely than the general population to have auditory processing disorder, but it is often overlooked even by people like audiologists who should be looking out for it. Probably in part because audiologists don’t seem to be nearly as well trained to diagnose ©APD as they are to diagnose deafness, but probably also in part because any difficulty we have with comprehension gets attributed to the hearing loss, so people don’t think to look further. Once in high school, my speech therapist was trying to tell me that I was persisting in adding an “i” sound to a vowel blend that wasn’t supposed to have it, and she tried to help me hear the difference by saying it both the wrong way (the way I was saying it) and the right way, and I couldn’t hear the difference. She was puzzled because she knew from my audiogram that I should have no problem hearing vowels and certain hard consonant sounds. (I can hear them, I just can’t always hear the difference between them!)  

It wasn’t until years later when I took an introductory course in audiology from a really great teacher that I finally learned a bit about auditory processing disorder. One of the class assignments was for all the deaf and hard of hearing students to bring in our audiograms (this was at Gallaudet University, so there were a lot of us), and for all the hearing students to go get a hearing test and bring in their audiograms too. The teacher noticed that apparently my speech discrimination score was a lot lower than it should be given the amount I could hear. He explained that it is common for many deaf/hard of hearing people to have auditory processing disorder and asked if I ever needed to turn down the volume in order to hear certain things more clearly, and I said “yes”. Apparently this is a good tip off to the possibility of audio processing disorder because apparently people who don’t have it can always hear more clearly by making it louder?  Which certainly helps explain why many people get so confused when I try to explain that, no, just because I can hear some of what they say doesn’t mean that I can understand it. 

angreav:

elvishgirl:

Projeto Identidade is a Brazilian project idealized by Noemia Oliveira and Orlando Caldeira. The project raises the question of the black representation in pop culture.

BEAUTIFUL!!!

politicalprof:

It is always interesting what we choose to worry about …

Fuck the NRA.

crime-she-typed:

schmaniel:

kthehermit:

yeli:

yasboogie:

Chris Rock is by far the most woke comedian #OscarsSoWhite

This is it right here folks!!!

I got so scared but he stayed true

We definitely need nicer white people.

YOU BETTA GO TF AWF HE HIT THAT TOPIC RIGHT ON THE NAIL!!!!

libraryoftheancients:

squirrelstone:

gideonseymours:

miscommunication as a plot device makes me angry

if you just talked to each other but no

on the one hand i agree with this but on the other hand one of my coworkers rented an alpaca from a petting zoo and brought it to work because my boss said she wanted an alpaca sweater but the guy didn’t hear her say sweater and didn’t want to upset her by asking why the fuck she’d want an alpaca

I think that highlights a good genre difference: miscommunication in drama is frustrating, overused, and just kinda shit. Miscommunication in comedy is fucking hilarious.

I was just at the drug store and as I was leaving the cashier said, “Thanks. I hope you find your destiny.”  And I didn’t know how to respond because it’s a nice thought but if it’s your destiny you … Continue reading →

“

I had my father get sick when I was 22. And I was poor, alright. And my father had an ulcer, and it exploded and you know all these toxins get in your blood. And basically, my father died, whatever, 50 days after his ulcer. So I had a father get sick while I was poor.

My mother got sick when I was rich. And my mother, you know… I don’t really want to get into it, but my mother was sicker than my father. And my mother’s alive. My mother’s fine, OK? I remember going to the hospital to see my mother and wondering, ‘Was I in the right place?’ Like, this was a hotel. Like it had a concierge, man.

People don’t… if the average person really knew the discrepancy in the health care system, there’d be riots in the streets, OK? They would burn this motherfucker down!”

”

-

Chris Rock [video]

Bringing this back, because some people don’t seem to understand that there is a discrepancy in the quality of care among poor, middle-class, and wealthy people, NO MATTER HOW DEBILITATING THEIR RESPECTIVE DISEASES MAY BE.

(via cgdageek)

It’s like that scene in a bad 1990s straight-to-video psychological crime thriller where the cop runs a suspect’s fingerprints — only to find he’s the suspect! Except now it’s a major movie studio flagging websites that it created and owns as copyright pirates.

TorrentFreak points to a recent Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice sent by Warner Bros. to Google, demanding the search engine remove links to dozens of websites that are allegedly violating Warner Bros.’ copyright on movies like The Dark Knight and The Matrix.

And of course there are the usual boneheaded mistakes you find on these sorts of notices, including demands to delist things like the Amazon.com page for The Dark Knight, or the RogerEbert.com review page, IMDB listing, and the Sky TV info page for Batman Begins.

Then there are the two truly idiotic takedown requests:

Yup, Warner Bros. flagged the official home video sites for The Dark Knight and The Matrix as DMCA violations. And this isn’t the first time it’s made a mistake like this. TorrentFreak notes that only a few days earlier WB sent a takedown demand for its own site for the risible 2012 Zac Efron romance The Lucky One, but maybe the company was trying to do a public service by scouring the internet of references to that film.

The Warner Bros. goof joins a long list of moronic DMCA takedown demands, including:

• Columbia Pictures’ attempt to scrub the web of any video with the word “pixels” in the title.
• Universal’s attempt to delist the IMDB page for Furious 7
• A DMCA claim trying to take down the entirety of Skype, Dropbox, and Whatsapp.
• Multiple movie studios demanding the removal of a free documentary about The Pirate Bay.
• Paramount accusing unrelated forum discussions of hosting pirated copies of Ghost and Clueless.