Bridget

trust me, it’s foolproof

You don't have to look far for recent bad news about crowdfunded video games, one of the highest profile categories in Kickstarter. This past week, an artist on an ambitious dino-hunting game called The Stomping Land said all development had stopped and its creator is AWOL, vaporizing $114,000 in donations. Peter Molyneux has been excoriated for the failures of Godus, funded at $730,000, though at least that game still is alive. And on Friday, Kotaku rolled out this report, reminding users of more than $2 million in crowdfunding that has delivered no games.

What about other projects? This spreadsheet, curated by NeoGAF member Stumpokapow, charts the progress (or lack thereof) of Kickstarter games funded at $75,000 or higher since...

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Described as a kinetic sculpture, Ro-Bow (as the name suggests) is a violin-playing robot that uses electromagnetic actuators to play digital files. Yeah, it won't be the first chair at the London Philharmonic any time soon, but its pretty amazing to watch all the machine's parts work in unison to produce some pretty decent tunes.

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sixpenceee:

Lake Sorvagsvatn located in Faroe Islands, between Norway and Iceland. It is 30 meters above the Ocean.

To promote this year’s “Great Horror Campout,” the event producers at Ten Thirty One Productions will be hosting an outdoor screening of “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter” this March on, of course, Friday the 13th. Like other outdoor screenings that occur throughout Los Angeles, guests are encouraged to bring blankets and picnic baskets. But […]

Deputies Save Boy's Birthday Party After None Of His Friends Show Up: "To serve (birthday cake) and...

The biggest biotech discovery of the century is about to change medicine forever: They’re called the...

This is no ordinary Buddha statue. As the CT scan at the right clearly shows, there's a mummy concealed inside!

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Around the corners of the internet where I hang out, mentioning 50 Shades of Grey can be like standing in a shooting range. It’s difficult to talk about, as anything short of wholesale condemnation brings a barrage of outrage for your assumed avocation of abusive relationships and bad BDSM practices.

“If only these kink-curious newbies could see Secretary instead!” I’ve heard people say many times.

That the abuse and poor BDSM practices of 50 Shades is so reviled but that the same practices in Secretary are adored and embraced is genuinely baffling to me.

So, my Dearest Perverts, today I’m illustrating how Secretary also romanticizes abuse and promotes unsafe BDSM practices equally as badly, if not WORSE, then 50 Shades.

Shocking, I KNOW.

Let’s do a Quick Plot Synopsisisisis (That word’s always looked ridiculous to me):

Secretary (2002) is an erotic romantic film directed by Steven Shainberg about a BDSM relationship that takes place between virginal, fragile, troubled, naive protagonist Lee Holloway (who has just been released from a mental hospital) and Mr. Grey, her haunted, dominant, sadistic boss.

The 50 Shades trilogy began as free Twilight fanfiction written by E.L. James and was published by Random House between 2011-12. In it Anastasia Steel, our virginal, fragile, troubled, naive protagonist (who is still a senior in college), enters into a BDSM relationship with haunted, dominant, sadistic millionaire Christian Grey.

Before we go any further, I need you to know something.

I love Secretary.

I watch it once a year and have done so ever since buying it on DVD as a wee-freshman in college. I even had the soundtrack (but it’s now lost in the place where CDs go to hide from you). Since 2002, my annual re-watching has added up to approximately 20 hours of viewing. (Yes, I counted)

This is a beautiful movie told with exquisite storytelling, compelling acting, artful framing, carefully coordinated color palettes, and a musical score that’ll make your toes curl. And it’s not just me that loves it, it’s won many awards and is generally beloved by critics and audiences, both vanilla and kinky.

50 Shades, on the other hand, is horribly crafted garbage. It appears as if the author of the book has a sixth grade writing level, there is no pacing, the characters are one-dimensional, and their dialogue beyond insipid. Barf.

Both these tales romanticize abusive relationships. They both demonstrate remarkably poor communication, consent, and unsafe BDSM.

Stay with me.

In Secretary, Lee is the vulnerable, unstable employee of Mr. Grey, a man older and more experienced than her in life, who controls her ability to financially support herself. Even before their physical relationship begins, Mr. Grey, a man in a position of power over her, alternates between praising and humiliating her. That’s emotional abuse. Then, without communicating to her what he intends to do, without her informed consent, he orders her into his office where he proceeds to beat the fuck out of her ass because of a typo. They never discuss the nature of their relationship. Ever. They never communicate about what their likes and limits are sexually. They never establish safe words, and we never see any aftercare when their D/s scenes are over. When Lee needs him most as a human being, he coldly turns her away from his house. And after climaxing on her back, he devastatingly fires her. Now guys, I may not be a BDSM expert, but I’m pretttty sure that is not good aftercare.

What if Lee had been assaulted before she came to work for Mr. Grey? What if, instead of being surprisingly turned on by that first spanking, she was deeply triggered? Grey certainly doesn’t check in with her beforehand to make sure it wouldn’t be a traumatic experience. Then there’s the part where he lets her starve herself in his office, sitting in her own urine and excrement for days, until she is too weak to lift her own head. He leaves her unsupervised in a situation that could have created permanent damage. By the end of this scene, Lee’s so weak, that she’s in no state to get up and leave, and she very well could have just died of dehydration and starvation at his desk had he not returned in time. That situation was not safe or sane.

Lest you think Mr. Grey’s emotionally abusive behavior applies only to Lee, the movie establishes early on that this is par for the course. That part where he throws out his red pens? He uses the red pens to antagonize Lee, it’s not much of a stretch to assume he used them to also berate and humiliate all his former secretaries too. He terrorizes and devastatingly fires his poor secretaries (like the one seen leaving with her paycheck in mouth, obviously distraught) so frequently that he has a wooden sign surrounded in lights at the front of his building that announces when he needs yet another replacement. He hires these women as his office subordinates, intending to bully and emotionally destroy them. Mr. Grey is a serial abuser.

Alright, now try this on for size:
In 50 Shades, Christian presents Anastasia with a written document laying out all the sexual things he is into, a number of which she vetoes. Christian teaches Anastasia about safe words and is sincere that he will always honor it if she chooses to use them. Christian and Anastasia cuddle and are affectionate with each other after their BDSM scenes. That is, they practice aftercare.

Yes, the rest of 50 Shades is completely fucked, they absolutely have an abusive relationship, and yadda yadda yadda you can read the million other blog posts and essays detailing all the ways this book is Horrible For Society and Especially Women. But still… I can’t help but notice there is more direct communication and consent between our protagonists in this reviled book than there is in the celebrated movie Secretary.

Secretary is a movie that a good number of well-meaning kinksters hold up as an excellent example of how BDSM should be portrayed in the media. They wish people would watch this instead of consuming 50 Shades. This is done with the implication that this relationship of abuse and unsafe BDSM practices in Secretary is healthier than what we see between Anastasia Steel and Christian Grey in 50 Shades.

Is Secretary a better told story with superior character development than 50 Shades of Grey? Yes, absolutely.

Are the BDSM scenes in Secretary hotter than the graphic sex descriptions of 50 Shades of Grey? That’s subjective, but personally I’ve watched 20 hours worth of Secretary while my 50 Shades books got one read-through before I re-sold them to Powell’s for store credit.

Does 50 Shades of Grey romanticize abusive relationships and portray poor consent, communication, and unsafe BDSM practices, while Secretary does not? …Dude. No. Not at all. Not. At. All.

I completely appreciate that since 50 Shades became popular, now people are suddenly invested in pointing out the portrayal of abuse in romantic relationships in mainstream media. Yes, society upholds some pretty toxic models of heterosexual relationships through our entertainment and this needs to be actively combated.

But I’m just… kind of befuddled about the double-standard 50 Shades Critics have when it comes to the movie Secretary.

Readers took issue with me when I said in my comic that I have general faith in people to differentiate between what they find arousing in their fantasy porn and how they behave in real life with their real relationships. They fear that women will now just blindly throw themselves into unsafe situations and dangerous relationships because of these books. But I still believe that people –even women!– can enjoy problematic porn fantasies without being completely brainwashed by it, just like Secretary fans have already been proving since 2002.

The only difference between these two stories is that one is absurdly poorly written and the other is beautifully, masterfully told. If you’re not worried about Secretary viewers, then you don’t need to worry about 50 Shades readers either. Really! It’s ok, you don’t need to fret so much about what other people are masturbating about.

Now, I’d say it’s about time I upped my hours watched of Secretary from 20 to 21…

Further Reading

Laurie Penny in defence of Fifty Shades of Grey by Laurie Penny
If the personal is political, is it ever OK to want a spanking? by Lux Alptraum

humanoidhistory:

50 YEARS AGO TODAY — On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated while speaking to the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York City. Photo by Eve Arnold/Magnum.

Peanuts

Passing kidney stones is supposedly one of the most painful experiences a person can go through, and these images of one under a scanning electron microscope show us what they look like up close.

The images are from a lab at Eastfield College in Dallas. Its coordinator, Murry Gans, took the photos in 2012 after a colleague brought him a kidney stone to examine, like all colleagues would.

Crystals of calcium and uric acid in a kidney stone (Murry Gans / Eastfield College)

A view from above the crystals that form a kidney stone (Murry Gans / Eastfield College)

Kidney stones develop when your urine can't dilute all of the substances in it, like calcium and uric acid. Those substances stick together and form these terrifying, spiky crystals. If a stone pushes itself out of the kidney and into the ducts that take urine to the bladder, it can cause a significant amount of pain until its passed out of the body through urination.

There isn't any one cause for that buildup. Some metabolic disorders, genetic conditions, and dietary choices might contribute to their development. The stones' size varies too, from a stone so small it doesn't hurt to pass to ones that need to be broken up with a shockwave treatment.

More photos of the stones can be seen on Gans' blog.

camilladerrico:

"Mademoiselle Gatto" will be part of my Beauty In The Breakdown show at Thinkspace Gallery on feb28th! If you are interested in the original painting please contact @thinkspace_art for info! Can’t wait for the show it’ll be my 10th yr anniversary show. One decade of painting can you believe it? 😳😁 #TGIF #popsurrealism #poppainting #camilladerrico #frenchbulldog #frenchie #pug #bulldog #cats #kitty #kitten #blindness #blind

An escape from the earthly realm ruled by consumerism, celebrity and faceless Internet, the Lucent Dossier Experience aims to not merely entertain but to transform reality, providing a rapturous, music- and movement-filled journey that usually takes place only in dreams — or on really great psych drugs. This show promises...

Today the Department of Exceptional Upcyling is exploring the work of Nottingham, UK-based garment artist Joy Pitts who uses secondhand clothing to created awesome works of textile art. To date Pitts has used tens of thousands of clothing labels to create intricate animal portraits, including a beautiful swan made of 5,000 labels.

In 2013 clothing designer Paul Smith commissioned Pitts to create a rabbit using his own labels. Smith provided her with a palette of labels from which she selected the most vibrant colors and created a rabbit made of red and purple labels bounding across a black label background. The final piece was made of roughly 2,000 labels.

Pitts will be exhibiting work at the Lace Market Gallery in Nottingham from April 23rd to May 13th, 2014 and then at the The Lally Gallery at the Erewash Museum in Derbyshire from September 11th to October 30th 2015.

Visit Joy Pitts’ website to check out more of her upcycled clothing creations.

[via My Modern Metropolis]

Today, February 20, marks the tenth anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson killing himself with a .45-caliber handgun in his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. Since his suicide, the right-to-die movement has gained a stronger foothold in American consciousness—even if the country is just as divided as ever on whether doctors should be assisting patients in ending their own lives.

"Poling has always shown a majority of people believing that someone has a moral right to commit suicide under some circumstances, but that majority has been increasing over time," says Matthew Wynia, Director of Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Wynia believes a chief factor in that change has been "more and more people say they've given a good deal of thought on this issue. And the more people tend to give thought to this issue, the more likely they are to say they are in favor of people having a moral right to commit suicide, under certain circumstances."

The sticking point is what constitutes a justifiable reason to kill yourself or have a doctor do so for you. In Thompson's case, he was suffering from intense physical discomfort due to a back injury, broken leg, hip replacement surgery, and a lung infection. But his widow, Anita, says that while the injuries were significant, they did not justify his suicide.

"His pain was unbearable at times, but was by no means terminal," Anita tells me via email. "That is the rub. If it were a terminal illness, the horrible aftermath would have been different for me and his loved ones. None of us minded caring for him."

A mix of popular culture and legislative initiatives have shifted the terrain since then. When Thompson made his big exit in 2005, Jack Kevorkian was still incarcerated for helping his patients shuffle off their mortal coil. He was released in 2007, and shortly before his death a few years later, HBO chronicled his struggles to change public opinion of physician-assisted suicide in the film You Don't Know Jack, starring Al Pacino.

Last year, suicide seemed to cross a threshold of legitimacy in America. When terminally ill 29-year-old Brittany Maynard appeared on the cover of People magazine next to the headline, "My Decision to Die," the issue was thrust into the faces of every supermarket shopper in the US. Earlier in the year, the season finale of Girls closed with one of the main characters agreeing to help her geriatric employer end her life, only to have the woman back out after swallowing a fistfull of pills, shouting, "I don't want to die!"

After the self-inflicted death of Robin Williams last summer, those with strong moral opposition to suicide used the tragedy as an illustration of how much taking your life hurts those around you. "I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves," Henry Rollins wrote in an editorial for LA Weekly. "I don't care how well adjusted your kid might be—choosing to kill yourself, rather than to be there for that child, is every shade of awful, traumatic and confusing. I think as soon as you have children, you waive your right to take your own life... I no longer take this person seriously. Their life wasn't cut short—it was purposely abandoned."

A decade earlier, Rollins's comments might have gone unnoticed. As might have Fox News' Shepard Smith when he referred to Williams as "such a coward" for abandoning his children. Of course, both received a good lashing in the court of public opinion for being so dismissive toward someone suffering from depression. "To the core of my being, I regret it," Smith apologized in a statement. Rollins followed suit, saying, "I should have known better, but I obviously did not."

A 2013 Pew Research Poll found that 38 percent of Americans believed that a person has a moral right to commit suicide if "living has become a burden." But if the person is described as "suffering great pain and have no hope of improvement," the number increased to 62 percent, a seven-point jump from the way Americans felt about the issue in 1990.

"Psychic suffering is as important as physical suffering when determining if a person should have help to die."

Still, only 47 percent of Americans in a Pew poll last October said that a doctor should be allowed to facilitate a suicide, barely different from numbers at the time of Thompson's death. Wynia believes an enduring factor here this is the public's fear that assisted suicide will be applied as a cost-cutting measure to an already overburdened healthcare system.

"There is worry that insurance companies will cover medication to end your life, but they won't cover treatments that allow you to extend your life," he says. "And then the family is stuck with either ponying up the money to extend that person's life, or they could commit suicide. That puts a lot of pressure on both the family and the individual. Also, there is the issue of the doctor being seen as a double agent who isn't solely looking out for their best interest."

As with abortion before Roe v. Wade, when determined citizens are denied medical assistance and left to their own devices, the results can sometimes be disastrous. "There are people who try and fail at suicide, and sometimes they end up in much worse positions than they started," Wynia adds. "I've cared for someone who tried to commit suicide by drinking Drano; that's a good way to burn out your entire esophagus, and if you survive it, you're in very bad shape afterward."

A 2014 Gallup poll showed considerably more support for doctors' involvement in ending a patient's life. When asked if physicians should be allowed to "legally end a patient's life by some painless means," 69 percent of Americans said they were in favor of such a procedure. But when the question is whether physicians should be able to "assist the patient to commit suicide," support dropped to 58 percent. This has lead many advocacy groups to adopt the term "aid in dying" as opposed to "assisted suicide."

A statement on the Compassion and Choices website states: "It is wrong to equate 'suicide,' which about 30,000 Americans, suffering from mental illness, tragically resort to each year, with the death-with-dignity option utilized by only 160 terminally ill, but mentally competent, patients in Oregon and Washington last year."

According to Oregon's Death With Dignity Act—which permitted Brittany Maynard to be prescribed a lethal dose of drugs from her physician—a patient must be over 18 years old, of sound mind, and diagnosed with a terminal illness with less than six months to live in order to be given life-ending care. Currently, four other states have bills similar to Oregon's, while 39 states have laws banning physician-assisted suicide. Earlier this month, legislators in Colorado attempted to pass their own version of an assisted suicide bill, but it failed in committee.

In 1995, Australia's Northern Territory briefly legalized euthanasia through the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act. Dr. Philip Nitschke was the first doctor to administer a voluntary lethal injection to a patient, followed by three more before the law was overturned by the Australian Parliament in 1997. Nitschke retired from medicine that year and began working to educate the public on how to administer their own life-ending procedure without medical supervision or assistance. Last summer, the Australian Medical Board suspended his medical registration, a decision which he is appealing.

Nitschke says two states in Australia currently offer life in prison as a penalty for anyone assisting in another's suicide, and that he's been contacted by the British police, who say he may be in violation of the United Kingdom's assisted suicide laws for hosting workshops educating Brits on how to kill themselves. Unlike more moderate groups like Compassion and Choices, Nitschke's Exit International doesn't shy away from words like "suicide," and feels that the right to die should be expanded dramatically.

A proponent of both left-wing social justice and right-wing rhetoric about personal freedoms, Thompson had very strong feelings about the role of government in our daily lives, particularly when it came to what we were allowed to do with our own bodies.

Laws in most countries that allow physician-assisted suicide under specific circumstances do not consider psychological ailments like depression a justifiable reason for ending your life. Nitschke sees a circular hypocrisy in this, arguing that everyone should be granted the right to end their own life regardless of health, and that those suffering a mental illness are still able to give informed consent.

"Psychic suffering is as important as physical suffering when determining if a person should have help to die," Nitschke tells me. "The prevailing medical board [in Australia] views almost any psychiatric illness as a reason why one cannot give consent—but the catch-22 is that anyone contemplating suicide, for whatever reason, must be suffering psychiatric illness."

These days, Nitschke is avoiding criminal prosecution by merely providing information on effective suicide techniques. So long as he doesn't physically administer a death agent to anyone—the crime that resulted in Kevorkian being hit with a second-degree murder conviction and eight years in prison—he'll most likely steer clear of jail time.

[body_image width='1069' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/02/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/20/' filename='ten-years-after-hunter-s-thompsons-death-the-debate-over-suicide-rages-on-220-body-image-1424464087.jpg' id='29634']

Philip Nitschke's euthanasia machine. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

"I think our society is very confused about liberty," Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, wrote in 2012. "I don't think it makes sense to force women to carry children they don't want, and I don't think it makes sense to prevent people who wish to die from doing so. Just as my marrying my husband doesn't damage the marriages of straight people, so people who end their lives with assistance do not threaten the lives or decisions of other people."

While support for laws banning physician-assisted suicide typically come from conservative religious groups and those mistrustful of government-run healthcare, the idea that the government has a role in deciding your end of life care is rooted in a left-leaning philosophy.

"The theory used to be that the state has an interest in the health and wellbeing of its citizens," acccording to Wynia, "and therefore you as a citizen do not have a right to kill yourself, because you are, in essence, a property of the state."

This conflicted greatly with the philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson. A proponent of both left-wing social justice and right-wing rhetoric about personal freedoms, Thompson had very strong feelings about the role of government in our daily lives, particularly when it came to what we were allowed to do with our own bodies.

"He once said to me, 'I'd feel real trapped in this life, Ralph, if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any moment,'" remembered friend and longtime collaborator Ralph Steadman in a recent interview with Esquire.

Sitting in a New York hotel room while writing the introduction to The Great Shark Hunt, a collection of his essays and journalism published in 1979, Thompson described feeling an existential angst when reflecting on the body of work. "I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my own tombstone... and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into The Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out into the air and across Fifth Avenue... The only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live—(13 years longer, in fact)."

Thompson's widow, Anita, was on the phone with her husband when he took his life. To this day, she feels that the situation was far from hopeless, that his injuries weren't beyond repair, and that he still had plenty of years left in him.

"He was about to have back surgery again, which meant that the problem would soon be fixed and he could commence his recovery," she tells me. "My belief is that supporting somebody's 'freedom' to commit suicide because he or she is in some pain or depressed is much different than a chronic or terminal illness. Although I've healed from the tragedy, the fact that his personal decision was actually hurried by a series of events and people that later admitted they supported his decision, still haunts me today."

In September 2005, Rolling Stone published what has come to be known as Hunter Thompson's suicide note. Despite being written four days beforehand, the brief message does contain the weighty despair of a man unable to inspire in himself the will to go on:

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won't hurt.

Seeing as he lived his life as an undefinable political anomaly—he was an icon of the the hedonism of the 60s and 70s, and also a card-carrying member of the NRA—it's only fitting that Thompson's exit from this earth was through the most divisive and controversial doorway possible.

"The fundamental beliefs that underlie our nation are sometimes in conflict with each other—and these issues get at some of the basic tensions in what we value as Americans," says Wynia. "We value our individual liberties, we value our right to make decisions for ourselves, but we also are a religious community, and we are mistrustful of authority. When you talk about giving the power to doctors or anyone else to help you commit suicide, it makes a lot of people nervous. Even though we also have a libertarian streak that believes, 'I should be allowed to do this, and I should be allowed to ask my doctor to help me.' I think this is bound to be a contentious issue for some time to come."

If you are feeling hopeless of suicidal, there are people you can talk to. Please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on Twitter.

I don't wear a watch and I hate time and yet I'm still so very impressed with the movement of this watch by FP Journe. It's stunning and it is the most complicated watch that FP Journe makes because it's a grande sonniere watch. Which means, it's a complication that is able to audibly chime out the time.

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He was only with us for such a short time, that snarky green alien who posed as a human being. But the love for Zim never stopped and in fact only grew stronger. Now fans everywhere will be getting their wish: more Invader Zim is coming this July from comics publisher Oni Press.

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The next version of Rock Band is in development for current-gen consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, according to a Bloomberg Business report citing a source familiar with the plans.

Series creator Harmonix Music Systems is developing the game, the source says.

This week's report is the latest in a series hinting at Rock Band's return. Last month, Harmonix distributed a survey asking fans what they'd like in a current-gen sequel and asking which consoles players owned between PS4, Xbox One and Wii U. That followed a similar survey last June. January also saw the release of the first new tracks in two years. And just this week, the Rock Band music store got new DLC. The two new songs are both about things you love coming back.

...

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What better way to rejoice in this awesome weather whilst the East Coast continues to freeze over than with a scoop of ice cream at a coastal-inspired creamery? [ more › ]

7 Stages of Grief: Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance Acceptance Speech ...

90s

Singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur, who released his Lou Reed tribute album Lou in 2014, will be back in L.A. this summer! After performing at the Troubadour last year, Joseph Arthur will return to that West Hollywood venue on Tuesday, June 9,...

breakingbadfriends:

Something you might want to remove from your vocabulary. (x)

What we’re reading

I made this one (like the anish kapoor whirlpool) let's see where it winds up

Hungry Silly Putty

toadschooled:

Some very expressive Colorado river toads [Bufo alvarius] [x] [x]

Something amazing, Jon Adams