Jake Eakle

hairdresserrempel:

SPRAY CHALK SHOOT- NOVEMBER 2013

HAIR: REMPEL ROQUETTE USING BUMBLE AND BUMBLE
MAKEUP: KARLY PARANICH
PHOTOGRAPHY: LAUREN KURC
MODEL: LOVISA

explore-blog:

The great Adrienne Rich, born 85 years ago today, on the dignity of love and how relationships refine our truths – spectacular read.

pardonmewhileipanic:

I’ve said this before and I’ll point it out again:

Menstruation is caused by change in hormonal levels to stop the creation of a uterine lining and encourage the body to flush the lining out. The body does this by lowering estrogen levels and raising testosterone.

Or, to put it more plainly: “That time of the month” is when female hormones most closely resemble male hormones. So if (cis) women aren’t suited to office at “That time of the month” then (cis) men are NEVER suited to office.

If you are a dude and don’t dig the ladies around you at their time of the month, just think! That is you all of the time.

And, on a final note, post-menopausal (cis) women are the most hormonally stable of all human demographics. They have fewer hormonal fluctuations of anyone, meaning older women like Hilary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren would theoretically be among the least likely candidates to make an irrational decision due to hormonal fluctuations, and if we were basing our leadership decisions on hormone levels, then only women over fifty should ever be allowed to hold office.

If a slow accumulation of time is necessary to completely separate you from an event or condition of the past, a single moment is often all that’s necessary to drag you forward and into the present. Suddenly, a time that still seemed close–almost revisitable, like an annex to now, so fresh in the memory–is re-sited forever. It is irreducibly past. Before that moment, it could still be touched in some way. It still seemed accessible: now it isn’t. Even the illusion of accessibility is over. The past is the past. This frees you to move forward, at least into the present. (Although if you aren’t careful–and you feel, for instance, “liberated” as opposed to liberated –it’s easy to mistake that movement for the beginning of a journey into the future you’ll never reach.) Perhaps because I can live in a vanished present for two or three years before something tugs me out of it, the whiplash attendant on this process–this fallacy of a sudden acceleration and a simultaneous catching up with yourself, as if you had moved ahead and left part of yourself behind–always both astonishes and delights me.

Down to the Iron Bridge. Upstream along the abandoned railway to the power station. Three hundred feet up from there via the first set of wooden steps to the top of Benthall Edge. Over a fence and into Patten’s Rock quarry; out of the quarry and into the woods. Down steep slopes between fallen trees, abandoned lime pits and rotted-looking streams. The light on the moss here is beyond being described as “radioactive”, “fluorescent” or any of those kinds of words. It’s unpackable. You can’t think of a thing to say except that another world is inside things or implied by things; and you’ve said that before, so many times, and you can never take yourself at your word. One of the pits features a twenty or thirty foot waterfall, less picturesque than it sounds. A further steep diagonal descent across the scarp–black mud under dead leaves, sphagnum moss and hartstongue fern–leads back to the railway line; immediately climb the shorter set of wooden steps up to Workhouse Coppice. Emerge on Spout Lane. Back to the town via Quarry Road. In a garden on Bridge Road I saw a thrush with a beak full of nesting materials. My knee’s a bit sore and I think life owes me a sausage roll.

person: *doesn't reply*
me: they hate me
me: i hate me
me: everyone hates me

Illustration by Anna Lisk.

“Contact with anybody
who has produced work of quality
fills me with an air of thwarted yearning empathy,
an implausible sense of fraternity,
a melancholy sting. Regret and resentment
gnawing at me, eating me alive.
This is what you reap
when you haven’t sown anything.”

- John Tottenham (via nevver)

I literally got my wife a rock to wind a piece of string around for Valentine’s Day this year. Needless to say, she LOVED it. 

Illustration by Lake Hurwitz.

Comic by Eleanor Davis.

There's nothing terribly new about the Picturephone; video telephony goes back to the 1960s, and was a very long time catching on. I myself remember one excruciating intercontinental video conference from 1994. (The problem with using it for work is that you can't look away from the camera, relax, or otherwise show any sign of weakness or humanity. And it doesn't get you much extra, over a regular phone call. But I digress.)

Over the past decade, webcams have become ubiquitous and we've gotten used to the occasional skype or other video call. And there communications go, the spooks follow ...

It turns out that the British equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ, has been spying on Yahoo webcam users. And they're a bit upset by what their Optic Nerve program revealed.

For starters, it turns out that 3-11% of Yahoo! webcam traffic involves "undesirable nudity". Which presumably means the users are not merely baring their faces at the cameras, but baring their other bits, with rather more enthusiasm than Big Brother's salaried employees are happy about. It's nice to have a figure for just how much of the internet is for porn; more amusingly, the serious people at GCHQ seem to have been taken aback to discover that people on Yahoo! were actually broadcasting their amateur action for all and sundry to see.

The deeply serious spooks tried to spare the sensibilities of their employees by employing automatic image porn filters. Unfortunately naive porn filters block images on the basis of how much of the picture consists of flesh tones. In the case of video conference calls, this turns out to be too much: they were getting lots of false positives (images classified as pornographic that were not in fact so), and as the whole point of the program was to trial face recognition software in order to detect Bad People Discussing Terrorism On The Internet, this was a bit of a problem.

More hilariously, GCHQ is not a law enforcement agency but part of the defense establishment, and the UK has one of the most draconian child pornography laws in the developed world. Possession of child pornography images is a strict liability offence — intent has no bearing. Only a handful of categories of people are permitted to possess this material: police investigating a crime, some forensics specialists, lawyers and judges and other people involved in a trial. GCHQ personnel stumbling across images of child abuse could be committing a criminal offence. And possession or dissemination of indecent material (pornographic but not criminal stuff) on government computers? Oh dear, the mind boggles.

I am still trying to get my head around the implications that the British government's equivalent of the NSA probably holds the world's largest collection of pornographic videos, that the stash is probably contaminated with seriously illegal material, and their own personnel can in principle be charged and convicted of a strict liability offence if they try to do their job. It does, however, suggest to me that the savvy Al Qaida conspirators[yes, I know this is a contradiction in terms] of the next decade will hold their covert meetings in the nude, on Yahoo! video chat, while furiously masturbating.

androphilia:

Kordale And Kaleb, Gay Black Fathers, Respond To Twitter Outrage Over Instagram Photos | HuffPost Gay Voices

A photo of two gay fathers has gone viral on the Internet — but maybe not for the reasons that you would expect.

be still, my heart. queer families of color that destroy a bunch of gender/race norms in one fell swoop!

fozmeadows:

 The smallrus is tiniest of the seal family, not much larger (and rather similiar in shape) to the garden slug. They prefer damp areas with large amounts of water, like well-watered gardens with fish ponds, and can often be seen sporting in puddles and bird baths, making their typical call (a sort of squeaky bellow.*) Any gardener is generally delighted to see the smallrus appear, as the occasional nibble of a leaf is more than made up for by their ability to keep down the number of mosquito larvae and other small aquatic nuisances.

This is so my ex-husband’s fault.

One day he was wandering around singing “I am the smallrus!”

"How big is a smallrus?" I asked.

"Very, very tiny."

"Awww."

"They’re bred as sock warmers. You can put your socks on the smallri to keep warm."

"AWWWWW!"

"They purr."

"AWWWWWWWWWWW!"

And just when I was thinking that I had misjudged this man for ten whole years, that he was capable of great depths of adorableness, that his capacity for cuteness was far beyond anything I’d guessed, and he’d merely been hiding it behind a facade of mild pervesion and non-sequitor—

"And they’re great with honey-mustard sauce!"

*sigh*

As my friend Kathy said, “He is capable of great flights of whimsy, you just can’t listen all the way to the end.”  -Ursula Vernon

—————————-

*Inhale a good lungful of helium and yell “GRONK!” and you’ve about got it.

True story: online, I refer to my son as the Smallrus (I called myself a walrus while pregnant, which, logically made him a small walrus, or Smallrus: so). As it happens, the creator of the illustration above follows me on Twitter, and I follow her, and when she saw me use the word Smallrus, she shot me a message asking, had I named my son after her painting? When I said no, she showed me her artwork, I exclaimed over its awesomeness, and she - because she is also awesome - mailed me a print of it, because Smallruses should stick together.

And ever since we moved to our new house, that same framed Smallrus print has sat on the shelf by my son’s bedside: tangible proof that the internet - much like imagination and human kindness - is a weird and wonderful creature.

“Most of our lives don’t feel like novels… Most of us have areas of our lives that we can’t even believe we lived them. It’s more like our lives are a bookshelf with 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or 12 novels… We look back and are like, “Who was that? Did I even live that life?” … There are ruptures in our lives that I always thought were better represented by the connected short story… I feel like a short story is truer to what we experience. We get to the end of a short story and then that shit is done forever. There are ways that we live that. There are ways that we have loved people and have had places, that once we’ve experience them they are gone forever and they never come back. I think that the form was form for me was also an attempt to argue for an ethos about the way that we live that I didn’t feel that a novel could always capture as pursausively… This is an argument for how much easier it is to portray a life with those kinds of ruptures.”

- Junot Diaz (via)

sawdustbear:

Sundays are for marathoning Bones and painting bugs, apparently. Thinking of making a print set of these guys for Wondercon - yay or nay? 

victoriousvocabulary:

VIVIFICENT

[adjective]

Obsolete: living; possessing life; not dead.

Etymology: from Latin vivus “alive”.

[Fay Helfer]

““Marriage is a mosque－ don’t tear it down.”
Green churidars, gold bangles, the gossip of empty cupboards.
“Marriage is －” Green churidars, gold bangles, “You are from
a good family, he is from a good family.” “He is a doctor, well-
educated man, how can he do this?” A broken set of porcelain
tableware; the imaam, kind and ignorant, gives good advice.
“Marriage is a mosque－ pray in it, have patience in it, sabr,
women must have sabr, women can－” “Think of your family,
your parents have such a good reputation; the woman waits
and then everything is alright. He is a good man, he has a degree,
his family has no scandal, he wears polished black, black, black shoes.”
Somebody in a fit of anger broke the dining room table. Good oak.
“He is a good man, he just can’t control himself. A mosque is a marriage－
don’t tear it down and don’t walk with your shoes into it.” Your child
is seeing the psychologist, he smashed your face into the bathroom
mirror because－ He is a good man, but he just can’t control himself sometimes.
The gossip of empty cupboards. “Women must have patience, sabr. He will
change. And if he doesn’t, so what? Women must－ He is a good man,
from a good family, doesn’t mean it.””

-

Marriage is a Mosque - Ameerah Arjanee 

“This is a poem I wrote about a year ago about my observations in my own South Asian/Mauritian Muslim community, about how domestic violence remains a taboo subject — something people and even (or maybe especially) religious leaders remain uneducated about and quick to think can be solved by mere patience/sabr/prayers from women. This attitude doesn’t come from bad intentions, but simply from: a lack of education about the real causes of domestic violence (the man is consciously abusing power, not possessed by a jinn); the severity of its physical and psychological damage, the pragmatic steps to take to help the woman in question, and the overriding fear of gossip and tainting the “family reputation.”

(via rabbrakha)

sabr. i remember hearing my mother say this to me often. be patient, nayyirah. mostly, I felt it a beautiful word, that evoked a calm, but it often had a greater meaning, a greater implied context. it felt as if she was saying, ‘nayyirah, practice accepting what is unacceptable. create more space in yourself to house all of the things that will hurt you, and make them into a peace you can live with.’ this incredible poem reminded me of the soothing almost indoctrinating understanding i felt from this word. i always say that islam in its essence is a gorgeous faith, but as it was practiced in my community, it was a conflicting space of beauty and immense pain for me. this poem captures that very indescribable pulse, that line, it is extraordinary.

(via nayyirahwaheed)

roachpatrol:

redjeep:

retrogasm:

When they realized women were using their sacks to make clothes for their children, flour mills started using flowered fabric for their sacks. The label was designed to wash out.

1939 Kansas Wheat…

holy fuck that’s the cutest marketing scheme i’ve ever heard of 

'buy our flour it's going to make the nicest bread and the sweetest dress!’ 

yes thank you ok sold

“

[There is a] general principle of internet language these days that the more overwhelmed with emotions you are, the less sensical your sentence structure gets, which I’ve described elsewhere as “stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence” and which leads us to expressions like “feels,” “I can’t even/I’ve lost the ability to can,” and “because reasons.”

Contrast this with first-generation internet language, demonstrated by LOLcat or 1337speak, and in general characterized by abbreviations containing numbers and single letters, often in caps (C U L8R), smilies containing noses, and words containing deliberate misspellings.

We’ve now moved on: broadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling. If you’re a doomsayer, the innovative syntax is one more thing to throw up your hands about, but compared to a decade or two ago, the spelling has gotten shockingly conventional.

In this sense, doge really is the next generation of LOLcat, in terms of a pet-based snapshot of a certain era in internet language. We’ve kept the idea that animals speak like an exaggerated version of an internet-savvy human, but as our definitions of what it means to be a human on the internet have changed, so too have the voices that we give our animals. Wow.

”

-

A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow.

This is my favourite part, if I do say so myself. See also the summary doge macro.

(via allthingslinguistic)

Marle is a bespoke typeface designed with the intention of being used for editorial purposes such as magazines and posters.

Taking its inspiration from French Didot and Italian Bodoni, Marle expands upon the notion of sweeping serifs and dramatic strokes, striding in the direction of fashion art, and borderline abstraction.

The full set is comprised of caps, numerals, and punctuation in one weight.

artmonia:

Illustrations by Melissa van der Paardt

i found this clipping hiding in a TMBG jewel case

http://betteo.deviantart.com/art/outside-insider-PRINT-179659701

adhocgenes:

coolinternetpresence:

ultraheartcombo:

composite post: the About Ducks comic

Fun duck info

Ducks go crazy

driftingfocus:

anogoodrabblerouser:

disquietingtruths:

universalequalityisinevitable:

Robert Sapolsky about his study of the Keekorok baboon troop from National Geographic’s Stress: Portrait of a Killer.

Thiiiiiiis, people, thiiiis!

1. Kill alpha male types
2. Achieve world peace

Got it.

I’ve actually read a lot of Sapolsky’s work.  He’s one of my favorite scientists in the neuro/socio world.

In 2006, I woke up in the ICU, blood pouring down one arm from a line the doctor was desperately trying to get in my arm. He was down on one knee, like he was going to propose, my arm flung out in front of him.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

He kept saying it. Over and over. My girlfriend stood next to me, gripping my hand. I was in intense pain, but even so, couldn't understand why he kept apologizing. My brain was a muddled gray mush, but I understood this much:

The pain was necessary. Expected.

They needed to get a line in me, you see, because I was dying.

And I knew it.

#

I read a lot of dark books. I'm a fan of the weird, the creepy, the strange. I have a fondness for Jeff VanderMeer and KJ Bishop and Angela Carter. I read Lovecraft only until it started to give me active nightmares. I've read everything by Christopher Priest, including the certainly not at all upbeat Fugue for a Darkening Island. I devoured Melvin Burgess's Bloodtide and Bloodsong like milky honey.

As a teen, I had people try and get me to read Terry Pratchett and Piers Anthony, but it just never took. I was getting something out of dark fiction, some catharsis, that I wasn't getting from other books with lots of laughs or tidy, upbeat endings.

How can you read all that stuff? People would ask me.

Life is fucking depressing enough.

But that was why I read it.

#

When I get laid off from my job in Chicago, six months after the ICU trip, I don't have any savings. No safety net. Because of U.S. health insurance laws at the time, I have to continue paying for health insurance or risk becoming uninsurable even under an employer plan. Health insurance costs me $800 a month and doesn't actually pay for a dime of the $500 a month that my new medication costs.

Chronic illness is like getting hammered upside the head with a shovel. They tell me it's an immune disorder, and there's nothing I could have done to prevent it. So sorry for you. Too bad. Could be worse. There are worse illnesses.

But now it costs me $500 a month in meds just to keep on living. Plus the $800 for the useless insurance. Plus $550 a month in rent. I'm making $320 a week in unemployment. And I've still got thousands in medical debt from the ICU visit.

In the comments of a recent Guardian article I'm quoted in, somebody tells me I'm bad at math.

Yeah, well. I was good enough then to know this wasn't going to work.

Death had never felt so close.

#

Life is dark, sometimes.

The trouble is, when you're pressed face-first into shit, all you can think about is trying to stay alive. It's all you do, when you're really desperate - you try and live. There's no time to emote, no time to figure it out, no time to sit on the bed and cry and feel sorry for yourself. When you're faced with your own problems, real, tangible I-could-fucking-die problems, you have to deal with them.

But a fictional problem?

Somebody else is dealing with that. You're just along for the ride.

It means you get to spend the whole ride actually feeling things, instead of buttoning it all back up so you can live.

This is the story of my life: getting called a monster because I do instead of feel, because I act instead of emote.

#

My week back at the house after the ICU visit, I saw blood every time I closed my eyes. My arms were filled with needle marks, covered in bruises. The pain was so bad, and I was so weak, I couldn't even prepare my own meals - I didn't have the strength to wield a knife.

I'd lost a tremendous amount of weight the last year, and more in the ICU. It was like I lived in someone else's body. I felt disconnected.

At night, I'd lie in bed, and when I closed my eyes I'd jerk awake again, haunted by sounds and smells and that blood, that blood gushing from my arm, pooling on the floor. I could smell the hospital antiseptic.

My week in the hospital, I was hooked up with a catheter. They stuck me with needles every three hours, and took blood four times a day. My period started. The catheter leaked. I got thrush, and couldn't eat, couldn't swallow. I spent a day lying in my own blood and urine. At one point an orderly threw a wet towel at me and told me to wash myself.

The memories of that horrible week came back every time I closed my eyes.

But I couldn't process what had happened to me, or how my life had changed now that I was totally reliant on medication for the rest of my life. I had thousands of dollars in medical bills. Rent had to be paid. I had to get back to work. I didn't have enough PTO time to miss work. I had to get back to work. Had to get back to living.

Gotta go. Gotta move.

I pretended I wasn't broken, because if I let myself be broken, I wasn't going to make it.

#

I'm not actually sure when I started writing dark fiction. I know I started writing GOD'S WAR the year I was dying. I was losing a lot of weight and drinking a lot of water, but nobody could figure out what was wrong with me.

It certainly started out as a dark little book; a war-weary world, a world-weary protagonist. But after I got back from the hospital, after I started measuring out my life in medication, something changed.

Because I realized something then, looking at all the medical bullshit keeping me alive:

Every life is a tragedy.

We are all going to die.

There is no other ending, no matter the choices you make.

There was some relief in that.

#

My first hospital visit after getting out of the ICU, I walked into the hospital bathroom and had a panic attack.

It was the strangest thing. One minute, I'm totally fine. I'm cool and collected. I'm just seeing my doctor, to deal with this bullshit illness.

But when I went into the bathroom and washed my hands, I smelled it: the antiseptic soap.

I'd first smelled it in the ICU, during that bloody horror show of a week.

I started to shake.

I went back into the bathroom stall and sat down. I burst into tears.

No reason.

Just the smell. The panic.

I'd been a body on a slab; a thing, subhuman.

Wash yourself.

#

I just finished playing a game called Mass Effect 3, the third in the Mass Effect franchise, naturally. It has a really contentious ending. The galaxy is being destroyed by an evil alien force, so of course your mission is to stop it.

But it's clear from the opening scene that you're basically fucked.

No matter what you choose, you're fucked.

I knew this from the very start. Right from the opening. I saw what was coming. I saw we were all fucked. And I played that game faster than any game I've ever played, because I could feel the urgency - yes, we're all fucked, but we're going to save the galaxy. I'm going to get there. I'm going to save it.

It's a relentlessly dark game, but it's just a game, right?

Yet I found myself playing this game and crying the whole way through it. I cried through the whole ending, because I knew. I knew from the very beginning. I knew how it would end.

We're all going to die.

But it was different, when I played the game. When I played it through in the game, it wasn't like in real life, when I had to keep moving, I had to keep sucking air; gotta find a job, figure out how to pay insurance bills, pack up my shit, move to a new place....

When I played the game, it was the character taking all these hits. It was the character who was letting people down. It was the character who had to keep moving.

And that freed me up to actually feel something.

I could actually roll through all those terrible emotions - the broken despair, the horror, the fear, the rage, the sorrow. I didn't have to muscle through. I could spend 40 hours of game time emoting, and not feel bad about it. It was emotion without weakness, catharsis without giving in to a real-world threat.

When I got to the end of the game, it was perfect, for me.

Because I knew from the start we were all going to die.

The challenge was having the fortitude to keep going when you knew you were going to die, when you knew it was all going to end.

For the character. For the fake galaxy.

For me, eventually.

And all of us.

#

I'm not sure where I picked up this relentless way of muscling through things without stopping to process them. I think it's a survival thing. My mom does this too, during times of great stress. The whole world bleeds away, and I get this laser focus. It means I'm incredibly good during times of fear and panic and crazy, but it can be days or weeks before I actually bust down and process what happened.

Reading tragedies, I realized, connecting with characters who persevered in the face of grim odds, and certain ends - were actually comfort reading for me. They put me into high-stress situations with no personal stakes, so I could actually feel the fear and discomfort and rage and horror without having any skin in the game.

Dark fiction didn't depress me - it invigorated me. So when folks talked to me about my work, or the books I read, and said they were downers, there was always a big disconnect. I understood why they would like upbeat endings, all neat and tidy, because real life wasn't like that, and they wanted something more hopeful.

But I felt plenty of hope all the time. It was the hope that kept me going.

I read because I needed to feel the other things without losing my shit and giving up.

Tragedies are, at their core, stand-ins for life itself. We all know how this little jaunt is going to end. We all know we're going to die. But we stick with it anyway. We persevere. We survive for just a little longer. Just a little bit longer, even knowing the end.

I do find real courage in that. There's a good story in that. And it's people who understand the end and get up again that I'm most interested in telling stories about, because people who take the hits and keep getting up inspire me to do it, too. If they can endure all that crap and get up again, well, hey, chronic illness and unemployment and bad relationships and poverty aren't so bad.

I did get up, eventually, I get up every time. Things got better.

But I know it won't always be sun and roses. I know the dark stuff is there - in my past, in my future. It bubbles up sometimes.

It's funny, though, because when it bubbles up I don't face it down, then: there are bills to pay, and posts to write. I face all that horror and fear on the page, instead. In safe stories about fake people's tragedies.

Tragedy is my comfort fiction, and I'm OK with that.