Steve Dyer

Here's a promo for the newest season of FX's Louie, which premieres on May 5th after a two-year hiatus. Click through to watch the past two promos for the series.

DEAD DOVE Do not Eat!

Top Banana - 1x02

submission by Austin Bridges

Researcher Meredith Ringel Morris found that new parents are too busy to post to Facebook:

After a child is born, Morris discovered, new mothers post less than half as often. When they do post,
fewer than 30 percent of the updates mention the baby by name early on, plummeting to not quite 10 percent by the end of the first year. Photos grow as a chunk of all postings, sure – but since new moms are so much less active on Facebook, it hardly matters. … If new moms don’t actually deluge the Internet with baby talk, why does it seem to so many of us that they do? Morris thinks algorithms explain some of it. Her research also found that viewers disproportionately “like” postings that mention new babies. This, she says, could result in Facebook ranking those postings more prominently in the News Feed, making mothers look more baby-obsessed.

I have another theory: It’s a perceptual quirk called a frequency illusion. Once we notice something that annoys or surprises or pleases us – or something that’s just novel – we tend to suddenly notice it more. We overweight its frequency in everyday life. For instance, if you’ve decided that fedoras are a ridiculous hipster fashion choice, even if they’re comparatively rare in everyday life, you’re more likely to notice them. And pretty soon you’re wondering, why is everyone wearing fedoras now?

(Photo by Sage Ross)

annawintour:

suburban-auschwitz:

lookin at the booty like

nevver:

More from The Portlandia Activity Book

alittlebitgayandmore:

Shang’s journey to self discovery as told by me

marieannelise:

When there’s too much shit you need to get done at once

Saturday Night Live announced today that Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen will both be hosting the show in April. The April 5th show will be the first time hosting for Kendrick, while April 12th will be the third time hosting for Rogen, who last hosted in 2009.

The musical guest on the Kendrick show is Pharrell, while Rogen's is Ed Sheeran. The next new episode of SNL airs March 29th with host Louis C.K. and musical guest Sam Smith.

7. “Brittney Griner is 23 years old, 6 feet 8 inches tall and one of the best female basketball players in the world. She was the WNBA top draft pick last year, and in college she set records for the most blocked shots in a season and the most career blocks in history — for male and female players. She’s so good that the owner of a men’s team — the Dallas Mavericks — has said he’d recruit her.”

Taller than a man. Faster than a man. Better than a man. That’s what butches are made of.

6. “She plays with a kind of emancipated abandon,” he says, and he admires her openness about the sexism and homophobia she’s encountered in the not-particularly-progressive world of college athletics.

Emancipated abandon. What else does she do with emancipated abandon, one wonders. One wonders and one shivers.

5. “Now she’s made it something of a mission to address closet culture in women’s sports.”

Brittney Griner cleaves through shadows and secrets with a hammer of flame and righteousness. She wears a breastplate of truth, and a girdle of strength, and a helmet of integrity, and she is arm’d so strong in honesty that your threats pass by her as th’ idle wind, which she respects not.

“I had a girl come up and tell me how her coach basically told them that they could not be gay on their team,” she says. “And I’ve heard stories of some coaches will not recruit you if you are.”

NOT ON BRITTNEY GRINER’S WATCH.

4. “When Nike endorsed her as its first openly gay athlete, the company asked her to model its menswear line.”

Brittney Griner in Oxford wingtips. Brittney Griner in form-fitting white suits. Brittney Griner in bowties, but it’s not pretentious or affected when she does it, somehow. Brittney Griner in those lightweight zip-up sweaters that are cut kind of square but wouldn’t look square on her, not at all, with the sleeves that fall just a little bit past the wrist.

She is poor. Poor and perfect. With eyes like the sea after a storm. She can track a falcon on a cloudy day.

Brittney Griner and I are joined by the bonds of true love. And you cannot track that, not with a thousand bloodhounds. And you cannot break that, not with a thousand swords.

“What I’m looking for in a woman is a blogger, someone who sits a lot, and just wants to watch Futurama episodes together and let me reenact all of Wesley’s scenes from The Princess Bride while she stays in her bathrobe all afternoon,” Griner probably continued. “Someone who will come to the gym and watch me bench press weights until all the veins in my forearms pop out, but won’t actually participate in any working out herself.”

3.”She dresses like a 1920s male dandy,” Zirin marvels. “And it’s pretty amazing to see. I don’t know anybody who pulls off argyle socks quite like Brittney Griner.”

*whispers weakly* a 1920s male dandy

2. “Griner is taller than 99 percent of the American population.”

*slides bonelessly to the floor*

1. “Now I want to stand out,” she says. “I want to show off how big I am; I want to show off my long arms, my big hands — just loving myself.”

She pauses, then adds: “It’s just a place of peace.”

Arms — hands — woman — guhhhhhhnnhhnhnh –

Mallory Ortberg was co-editor of The Toast from 2013-2014. She will be deeply missed.

Read more Seven Lines From NPR’s Interview With Brittney Griner That Put Me On The Floor at The Toast.

Careful readers of this site may have noticed that I bear a particular fondness for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. My brother and I once spent an entire summer trying to complete the entire game (I was, and remain, a real stickler for side quests) in our recently-flooded basement instead of going outside in the fresh air and sunshine like your sister; I’m serious, go outside. To this day the smell of mildew and the sound of an industrial-strength fan transports me back to the first time I saw Link step out of the Temple of Time to find that seven years had passed and Re-Deads had overrun Hyrule Castle Town.

And if there’s one thing I love as much as Ocarina of Time (besides, I guess, Majora’s Mask), it’s hot queer babes in biker shorts and gender ambiguity. I tend to fall asleep during Very Serious Conversations about Sexism in Video Games™, so I’m pretty much going to focus on the masculine-of-center hotties and trans* readings of genderqueer characters and give all possible Unfortunate Implications (“But why do the Gerudos even need a king and shouldn’t Ruto be more independent and I think Malon lacks agency…”) a miss entirely. It’s such a great game for gays, lesbians and queermoppets of all stripes. Here’s a primer for those of you who might need a little push before picking up your old N64 controller.

Impa

One of the first important characters you meet outside of Kokiri forest, Impa is a butch vision in bike shorts. She’s Zelda’s bodyguard-slash-lesbian-babysitter and a member of the semi-legendary race of royal protectors known as the Sheikah (she’s also how I used to picture Winter Celchu, Leia’s childhood bodyguard, when I was really into Star Wars EU, but that’s not really important right now).

“But what makes Impa a lesbian?” BIKE SHORTS. Look at her. Look at her.

Those bike shorts (and those practical-yet-kinky boots) tell you everything you need to know about Impa. Her girlfriend’s a vegan chef; Impa’s not vegetarian herself but has enormous respect for that particularly lifestyle choice. They met at Dinah Shore weekend. She works part-time at a bike repair shop and goes trail running three times a week with a bunch of guys she used to work with when she was in Plastics. She’s really centered and makes her own bread and her friends often ask her to act as a babysitter when they take shrooms. She’s old-school, like still belongs to lesbian listservs and goes to Indigo Girls concerts kind of old-school.

“Wow, that’s really gay.” Shut up, I’m not finished yet. We’re going to get gayer before the Triforce is restored.

Nabooru

“First of all, let me introduce myself. I’m Nabooru of the Gerudo. I’m a lone wolf thief. But don’t get me wrong! Though we’re both thieves, I’m completely different from Ganondorf.”

Any woman who refers to herself as a “lone wolf thief” has my immediate attention. A female Raffles? Yes, please. She has a band of outlaws loyal only to her that she commands from a lonely desert outpost and her one goal is to steal the Silver Gauntlets, which grant their wearer incredible strength, so you know she’d be able to bridal-carry you over Zora Falls on your honeymoon to Lake Hylia.

Unfortunately, Nabooru gets kidnapped by a pair of twin witches (awesome) before she can steal the gauntlets for herself; they turn her into an Iron Knuckle (awesome) and force her to fight Link (awesome), who finds her to be one of the most formidable mini-bosses in the game (AWESOME). Her speed and stamina are insane, even for an Iron Knuckle, which is really saying something. The final (this is in no way final) verdict (I can’t actually make any kind of official ruling, so “verdict” is the entirely wrong word to use here, also sexuality is a continuum) on her orientation is this: she’s super-strong and super-bisexual. You can’t pin Nabooru down. She idly comments on Link’s handsomeness in his adult form, but doesn’t seem too bothered about being trapped in the Spirit Realm with Ruto and Impa, either. I mean, check out this significant Look between the two of them after Ganondorf is defeated:

Darunia might as well not exist. Plus, look at how many rings Nabooru is wearing. Have you ever known a woman who wears lots of simple rings to be straight? Case closed.

The Gerudos

This scene never, ever fails to make me laugh. Link has to rescue four hapless carpenters who’ve been imprisoned in the Gerudo fortress (the way the carpenters run off after he’s freed them, by the way, is the cutest, clumsiest run I have ever seen in my life). The Gerudo are an all-female race of misandrist pirates and thieves who produce a single male citizen every 100 years. Once Link defeats four Gerudo warriors in hand-to-hand combat, their leader makes him an honorary woman and accepts him as a member of their organization.

“I used to think that all men, besides the great Ganondorf, were useless…but now that I’ve seen you, I don’t think so anymore!”

You could argue that it’s a little sexist that the single male citizen becomes king (and that in this instance becomes Ganondorf, King of Evil and destroyer of Hyrule), but A of all, that’s boring and predictable of you, and B of all, Ganondorf doesn’t seem to have any actual power on display in Gerudo Fortress. No Gerudo warriors patrol Castle Town or protect his throne from Link’s attack. They just…keep being thieves in the desert. Ganondorf does his thing, and the Gerudo do theirs: riding horses, shooting arrows, kidnapping men, and stealing whatever’s not nailed down.

The Great Fairies

“The Great Fairies.” If you’re not picking up what Shigeru Miyamoto is putting down at this point, this may not be the game for you. The Great Fairies are beautiful drag queens who hide in fountains deep below the surface of the earth, only to leap up screaming with laughter every time a good-looking boy wanders in in order to shower him with glitter and gifts.

Sheik

The easiest way to waste an afternoon (if you’re as into gender studies as you are late-90s action-adventure games, I guess) is to wade through the various fights about Sheik’s “real” gender online. I am prepared to settle that question once and for all, right now:

Q: What is Sheik’s gender?
A: Ace bandages, bangs, and a hearty dose of roundhouse kicks, that’s what Sheik’s gender is.

Sheik is hot as shit and confusing like a motherfucker. Remember that episode of Boy Meets World where Rider Strong dressed up like a girl (“Chick Like Me“) and you found yourself with a head full of questions as you tried to fall asleep that night? That feeling was Sheik. The first time Link and Sheik meet, time itself seems to stop:

Is Sheik Zelda in disguise, and therefore a tomboy? Yes.

Is Sheik Zelda’s butch lesbian form — the Hylian equivalent of Shane? Yes.

Is Sheik Zelda utterly transformed into a male counterpart, and therefore a trans* hero? Yes.

Is Sheik the red-eyed antithesis of the gender binary, as fluid and as free as the water in the Zora Kingdom? Hell yes. Sheik’s gender is time-traveling bard. Sheik’s gender is shoulder muscles. Sheik’s gender is my hair’s falling across my eyes but I’m too busy playing the harp and fighting blood spirits to worry about that right now.

Sheik is the Great Confuser. By the time xie’s finished explaining the concept of the Hero of Time to you, you’re dazedly whispering at the screen, “I don’t know what gender you are, or what gender even is anymore, but I’ll learn whatever songs you have to teach me.”

Read more The Legend of Zelda’s Ocarina of Time: Giving The Gender Binary A Swift Roundhouse Kick To The Face at The Toast.

Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich resigns over Prop 8 controversy pic.twitter.com/FuzPYYRvJi

— NowThis News (@nowthisnews) April 3, 2014

The guy who had the gall to express his First Amendment rights and favor Prop 8 in California by donating $1,000 has just been scalped by some gay activists. After an OKCupid decision to boycott Mozilla, the recently appointed Brendan Eich just resigned under pressure:

In a post at Mozilla’s official blog, executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker confirmed the news with an unequivocal apology on the company’s behalf. “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it,” Baker wrote. “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

The action comes days after dating site OKCupid became the most vocal opponent of Eich’s hiring. Mozilla offered repeated statements about LGBT inclusivity within the company over the past two weeks, but those never came with a specific response from Eich about his thousands of dollars of donations in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that sought to ban gay marriage in the state.

Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

Michelle Goldberg diagnoses what increasingly ails us at The Nation:

It’s increasingly clear that we are entering a new era of political correctness. Recently, we’ve seen the calls to #CancelColbert because of something outrageous said by Stephen Colbert’s blowhard alter ego, who has been saying outrageous things regularly for nine years. Then there’s the sudden demand for “trigger warnings” on college syllabi, meant to protect students from encountering ideas or images that may traumatize them; an Oberlin faculty document even suggests jettisoning “triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.” At Wellesley, students have petitioned to have an outdoor statue of a lifelike sleepwalking man removed because it was causing them “undue stress.” As I wrote in The Nation, there’s pressure in some circles not to use the word “vagina” in connection with reproductive rights, lest it offend trans people....

At times like this, politics contract. On the surface, the rhetoric appears more ambitious and utopian than ever—witness, for example, the apparently sincere claim by Suey Park, creator of the #CancelColbert hashtag, that Twitter activists intend to “dismantle the state.” But at the same time, activism becomes less about winning converts and changing the world and more about creating protected enclaves and policing speech.

Go read the whole thing.

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ging-ler:

bjorgmans:

the saddest scene of frozen

I feel really bad for laughing

Looks like Rufus might’ve had some bad shellfish last night. 

no fucks

Among the scores of upset readers rattling the in-tray:

I’m going to disagree with you, quite strongly, about the resignation of Brendan Eich. While I agree that he is certainly entitled to his point of view, and to take actions in support of that point of view, he is not entitled to face no consequences from those actions. That’s all this is: consequences. If he truly has the strength of his convictions, he will consider this a necessary sacrifice. Were I to loudly proclaim a belief in the inherent inferiority of other ethnicities than my own, and take actions to enshrine that belief into law, would I not reasonably expect to face consequences?

He’s not going to prison; he just has to find a new job. For someone with his abilities, that should not be difficult. I just imagine it will be done more quietly this time.

As I said last night, of course Mozilla has the right to purge a CEO because of his incorrect political views. Of course Eich was not stripped of his First Amendment rights. I’d fight till my last breath for Mozilla to retain that right. What I’m concerned with is the substantive reason for purging him. When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line. This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance. If a socially conservative private entity fired someone because they discovered he had donated against Prop 8, how would you feel? It’s staggering to me that a minority long persecuted for holding unpopular views can now turn around and persecute others for the exact same reason. If we cannot live and work alongside people with whom we deeply disagree, we are finished as a liberal society.

Another reader:

Eich certainly has his right to free speech. Where the line should be drawn (Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding) is when somebody’s speech becomes action – in this case, donating to Prop 8. Monetary support to reduce fellow citizens to second-class status should not be enshrined as “protected speech.” He can say what he wants, of course, but we can also say, publicly, that we don’t want to directly fund that sort of politics (since our money given to the company goes to the CEO’s salary).

What if an employee went to a demonstration that his company found objectionable? Would that be a reason to fire him? What we have here is a social pressure to keep your beliefs deeply private for fear of retribution. We are enforcing another sort of closet on others. I can barely believe the fanaticism. Another reader:

There is not a single mainstream company in the world today that would endure a CEO who donated to a neo-Nazi organization, or the KKK, or for a referendum to make interracial marriage illegal.  If he were to apologize later, or say it was a mistake, then he might survive.  But to be defiant in his support for blatantly anti-Semitic or anti-black causes?  No one would survive this. In making our case for marriage equality, we have set the right to marry for homosexuals on the same level as the right to marry inter-racially.  This means that the public will respond to those who oppose it just as they would to those who fought to prevent my parents from marrying. And rightly so.

A little history lesson. Not so long ago, many in the gay community itself – including large swathes of its left-liberal wing – opposed marriage equality. I know, because I was targeted by them as a neofascist/heterosexist/patriarchal “anti-Christ”. Yes, I was called precisely that in print for being a conservative supporter of marriage equality and for ending the ban on openly gay people in the military. And I’m talking only a couple of decades ago. And now, opposing marriage equality is regarded as equivalent to the KKK? And neo-Nazis? Another reader tries to catch me in a double standard:

So let me get this straight: It’s perfectly ok to spend money supporting legislation that causes actual, direct harm to gay people, but when Alec Baldwin calls someone names, he should be fired?

I never called for Baldwin to be fired – just that his rank use of homophobia while threatening violence made his claim to be a liberal preposterous. I was calling out hypocrisy. I never campaigned for Baldwin to be punished for this – just that liberals stop defending him as a campaigner for civil rights. The next reader probably has the strongest dissent of them all:

You wrote, “Eich did not understand that in order to be a CEO of a company, you have to renounce your heresy!” Andrew, you are seriously misreading this. Mozilla is not just any company; it’s the subsidiary of a non-profit, the manager of an open-source project, part collective and part community, and only thrives because the community cooperates, delivering applications, helping out by contributing code, and donating money. A key qualification for a CEO of such a company is that he or she not alienate the community, and Eich simply did not meet that qualification (the board screwed up in hiring him, clearly). I hardly think you’d see the same kind of fireworks if, say, he had been appointed CEO of Oracle.

This is more akin to an opponent of gay marriage being appointed CEO of a company that depends on gay or gay-friendly customers or stakeholders. A public radio station in a gay-friendly metro is a good example. So it’s more like, “in order to be a CEO of an organization dependent on certain stakeholders, you must not offend them.” Seriously, this is news?

And CEO is not just any job; Eich was CTO of Mozilla for many years with nary a peep. But a CEO personifies the company, and the standards are different. Eich then compounded the mistake by eliding the discussion every time he was asked about it. He could have stood by his personal beliefs but drawn a distinction between those and how he intends to isolate them from his ability to lead Mozilla. He could have shown a bit of empathy towards the people victimized by Proposition 8 (many of whom are his customers, employees and partners) without recanting his personal belief (Rarebit, one of Mozilla’s partners that pulled out of the store, has a good take on this here).

He could have done many things, but he was too proud to give people even a fig leaf of an acknowledgment. Instead, he stonewalled, and more insultingly, he wrapped himself in the mantle of tolerance (the whole stuff about Mozilla’s “culture of inclusiveness”), essentially saying, “If you’re really tolerant, you must tolerate my intolerant views and continue to interact with the organization I lead just as before.” Please. He’s entitled to his views, but he’s not entitled to people’s cooperation.

In order to be a CEO of a company, you must be able to lead it. Clearly he couldn’t, because too many people, both employees and external stakeholders, simply would not follow him. He was pushed out because he could not do the job he was hired to do.

Really? Here’s what Eich said last month: “I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support to have the time to ‘show, not tell’; and in the meantime express my sorrow at having caused pain.” There is not a scintilla of evidence that he has ever discriminated against a single gay person at Mozilla; he was dedicated to continuing Mozilla’s inclusive policies; he was prepared to prove that the accusations against him were unfair, and that his political views would not affect his performance as CEO. But this was not enough. He had to be publicly punished for supporting a Proposition that is no longer in effect. This is absolutely McCarthyism from an increasingly McCarthyite left. Another reader makes a distinction:

Gay activists didn’t run him out.  I really think you are wrong on that.  Sure, some of the usual suspects piped up.  But that wasn’t what did it as far as Mozilla goes.  It was young and down-for-the-cause straight people.  There’s been a very radical, very recent shift in critical mass and majority opinion (especially among tech people, young people) that opposing gay marriage is immoral.  This supportive/progressive/tolerant/well-intentioned straight majority does not hesitate (although it should) to equate gay rights issues with race based civil rights issues.  The gay marriage issue has tapped into a moral consciousness.

After all these years of ducking whenever someone starts talking about morals, the gays are now on the winning side of that conversation.   And I think this moral shift is so new that we don’t see it yet.  And so I don’t share your disgust that Eich quit.  He lost the respect of the co-workers and colleagues he was supposed to lead due to something than runs deeper than a mere political point of view.  This was a moral position.  And a growing number of reasonable average people just can’t abide homophobia anymore.  It wasn’t an angry rump of gay activists that did him in.

Yes, it was broader than that. It was a coalition of those, gay and straight, who do not believe that people with different views than theirs’ should be tolerated in a leadership position. It’s a reminder of just how closed-minded and vicious so much of the identity-politics left can be. One more reader:

Morality has always been about keeping society on the same page. If you violate the the norms, then you are shamed and ridiculed. The ultimate “victory” of the gay rights movement will be that those discriminating against homosexuals will be ridiculed and isolated as bigots. Ultimately we can only hope that the best values win out, and that we will always find outcasts in society that share our values, should our values violate the norm.

There you have the illiberal mindset. Morality trumps freedom. Our opponents must be humiliated, ridiculed and “isolated as perverts”. I mean “bigots”, excuse me.

Orwell wept.

Update: More unfiltered feedback at our Facebook page.

Symbolic gestures make sense when there are no pragmatic alternatives, like the things Eich was working on. You shot one of the good guys.

— Dave Winer ☮ (@davewiner) April 4, 2014

If you care about the open web, please help de-politicize Mozilla http://t.co/8n3d8QHCwv

— Ben Moskowitz (@benrito) April 4, 2014

Mozilla, if you don't know it, is a much-respected nonprofit with a business nestled inside it that, among other things, makes Firefox. They elevated Brendan Eich, one of their cofounders, to CEO. Eich was a Prop 8 donor; people objected. Three board members resigned when he was given the job, including two who were former CEOs. (The organization says those board members were planning on leaving, but their departure leaves the Mozilla Corporation board with three whole members.) Employees asked Eich to step down. Eich made a commitment to help Mozilla ensure its place as an ally to the gays. And then Eich resigned, and resigned from the board of the foundation itself, which now has just five members.

And now the gays are being blamed for their pesky "interference" in this important company. And we're getting straightsplained about how we "politicized" Mozilla. Why did we do this terrible thing! Why did we "shoot" one of "the good ones," in the classic language of Dave Winer? Yes, and why did we make those board members go away? How can we want to live in a society where people with despicable views won't defend them long enough to make the situation better, and instead, huff off, quit their jobs and apparently delete their Twitter accounts? One minute Eich was blogging about how he'd show everyone that he could deal with a complicated situation, celebrate diversity and the company, and ensure that everyone could trust in his leadership. Eight days later, his willingness to see that process through had apparently evaporated. Mozilla politicized Mozilla. And the gays didn't make Eich quit. He didn't want to do the actual work. He flounced.

The post Gays Assassinate CEO appeared first on The Awl.

Rachel Giese insists that teen boys need better sex ed:

Sex educators report that young straight men are the most frequently ignored demographic when it comes to sexual health. Since girls and women overwhelmingly bear the consequences of unwanted pregnancies, violence, and discrimination, sexual health initiatives around the world tend to focus on their needs (one exception being AIDS awareness campaigns targeted at men). It comes as no surprise, then, that boys often find these female-slanted programs irrelevant and boring, and may even come to think that they have no responsibility for their own sexual health or their partners’. This lack of education and expectation, coupled with the shoulder-shrugging cop-out that “boys will be boys,” carries serious repercussions. …

Studies indicate that boys are less likely than girls to seek clinical sexual health care, because they feel embarrassed and afraid to look stupid or unmanly. When they do receive medical attention, doctors are less likely to raise the issue of sexual health with them than with girls. Meanwhile, as teenage pregnancy in Canada continues to decline, sexually transmitted infections are climbing. More than two-thirds of chlamydia cases reported in this country occur among those aged fifteen to twenty-four. In the United States, the same age group accounts for nearly half of the 19 million new cases of STDs each year. This suggests that while girls are using contraception to prevent pregnancies, boys, who have more control over the use of condoms, are not wearing them consistently to prevent the spread of infections.