Sophianotloren

On Friday, February 14, actress Ellen Page speaks about the brave decision to live openly and authentically.

ghostbanri:

this is hands down the most suspicious headline I’ve ever read

Goodbye, Spot.

image via Las 2 Orillas

A Colombian artist formerly known as Ladyzunga Cyborg successfully changed her name to ABCDEFG HIJKLMN OPQRST UVWXYZ after several rejections by the Colombian National Registry. In an interview with Las 2 Orillas, UVWXYZ spoke about how she still prefers to be called Ladyzunga and that the entire alphabet is a tool used to name all things, and thus would allow constant reinvention.

I started looking for a name that nobody had in Colombia, or the world, so I thought ABCDEFG HIJKLMN OPQRST UVWXYZ would suit me.

image via Ladyzunga

via The Telegraph

A series of illustrations by artist Robert Brown depict how dogs see the world differently. The art takes everyday objects and situations and exaggerates them to absurd levels.

images via College Humor

onlyleigh:

"There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan."

                   -sullivan’s Travels

I don't think this is just happening in Chicago -- I'd be surprised if it's not going on in most major cities, albeit less formally than this. And it's been going on for a while, so it's not something we can blame on Rahm Emanuel. But it does says we're living in a police state, no matter how much we may not want to acknowledge that. Via the Guardian:

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

read more

A temple in collapse in ‘Apotheon,’ a video game influenced by Greek vases (all screenshots by the author for Hyperallergic)

Ancient Greek pottery was as much about its stories as its forms. Cavorting satyrs, wrathful deities, battling athletes, and mortal warriors are frozen in this mythology of clay. Apotheon brings that classical world to life as a full-length animated video game.

Scene from ‘Apotheon’ (GIF by the author via YouTube)

Released through Steam by Alientrap this month for PC and PS4, Apotheon is a gorgeous interpretation of the black-figure Greek pottery style of the 6th to 4th centuries BCE. As the intrepid Nikandros, you’re on a one-man quest against Zeus, who has left humanity to rot. Teaming up with Hera, who is unhappy as usual with Zeus’s philandering, you battle your way through the Olympians, from Apollo with his dance party to Poseidon in a wrathful sea. Mostly it’s a standard progression in each level from small tasks to killing a “boss” with whatever xiphos or doru you have handy. In the most beautiful sequence, and the best to grasp the twists of fate entwined in Greek mythology, you first chase Artemis disguised as a deer through a forest, then later have to flee her bow when transformed into prey yourself.

Boat on an Attic black-figure cup (520 BCE) (via Cabinet des Médailles)

On a Greek ship in ‘Apotheon’

I played Apotheon on my MacBook Air (not the intended platform) and the gameplay was a bit cumbersome, combining a mix of defense and weaponry that takes some getting used to. If you play without a console, you have to juggle between a mouse for targeting and keyboard shortcuts for movement and fighting. However, I was in it for the visuals, curious after discovering the Greek vase animations of Steve K. Simons last year to see how they would be incorporated into a game. Most of the play of Apotheon is basically kill-kill-kill, and the endless slaughter can be gleefully gruesome, with heads flying and animated blood sometimes spilling down the stairs. This is ancient Greece, after all, so propriety is not to be expected. More variation in gameplay would have been an exciting way to break up the action, though. Perhaps some chariot competitions, bacchanalian drinking challenges, foot races, or other spectacles depicted on the historic vases might have made for a welcome break from the bloodshed.

Nevertheless, the game is strikingly vivid from start to finish. There’s an impressive depth to the hues of ochre, green, and gold through which Nikandros plunges as you encounter poor Daphne transformed into a laurel tree in Apollo’s garden, or fall beneath the giant club of the cyclops Brontes. It’s not an educational game on classical art by any means, but it is notable for successfully embracing an ancient aesthetic and reinterpreting it centuries later in an entirely modern medium.

Black-figure Greek vase (via Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon)

Illuminating the dark in ‘Apotheon’

A temple in ‘Apotheon’

Encountering a cyclops in ‘Apotheon’

Teaming up with Hera against Zeus, with a preview of Artemis in ‘Apotheon’

Daphne transformed into a laurel tree in ‘Apotheon’

Apotheon is available on Steam for PC and PS4.

Unknown artist, “Untitled” (Woman holding pig, cop in pursuit) (1960–75), tempera on illustration board, 15 x 11 in (38.1 x 27.94 cm)

Postwar pulp art south of the border was distinctly surreal. In Pulp Drunk: Mexican Pulp Art at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in Chelsea, the lurid art created for paperbacks in the 1960s and ’70s includes a cat man superhero surrounded by feral felines, a woman fleeing a cop while cradling a piglet, and a blonde vixen looking back in shock as a skeleton delivers her a letter.

The exhibition presents grid after grid of these vibrant, tempera-on-board works, united in their strangeness, a vivid use of color, and spaces at the top intended for sensational titles. While some are signed, others are anonymous, lost to the production process of turning out cheap books as quickly as the public could buy them. Each cover, whether it features damsels in psychedelic distress, rampaging robots, or murderous clowns, suggests some new lurid adventure. As the gallery notes in its release, the subjects “are not gallant martyrs but commoners who have found themselves confronting outlandish and startling predicaments as a result of poor decisions or risky behavior.”

But in Pulp Drunk, the individual illustrations are detached from their original narratives and arranged in one long, bizarre sequence that captures a moment in publishing and marketing in Mexico. It’s a dream version of everyday life where the absurd intrudes violently and scandalously: a gorilla storming a bedroom or a surprised maid happening upon a woman surrounded by equally startled green aliens. While American pulp fiction of this era was more focused on sex and crime, in Mexico the allure of these escape fantasies was often the invasion of oddities into the mundane.

Unknown artist, “Untitled” (Cat Man) (1960–75), tempera on illustration board, 15 x 11 in (38.1 x 27.94 cm)

‘Pulp Drunk: Mexican Pulp Art’ at Ricco/Maresca (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

‘Pulp Drunk: Mexican Pulp Art’ at Ricco/Maresca (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

F Zavala, “Untitled” (Robot holding red car in air as city burns in background) (1960–75), tempera on illustration board, 15 x 11 in (38.1 x 27.94 cm)

Unknown artist, “Untitled” (Gorilla attacking man as horrified woman watches) (1960–75), tempera on illustration board, 15 x 11 in (38.1 x 27.94 cm)

‘Pulp Drunk: Mexican Pulp Art’ at Ricco/Maresca (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

‘Pulp Drunk: Mexican Pulp Art’ at Ricco/Maresca (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Unknown artist, “Untitled” (Woman posing for calendar shoot with shocked photographer) (–75), tempera on illustration board, 15 x 11 in (38.1 x 27.94 cm)

Pulp Drunk: Mexican Pulp Art continues at Ricco/Maresca Gallery (529 West 20th Street, 3rd floor, Chelsea, Manhattan) through March 7.

Physics Girl demonstrates a neat trick with a stack of balls. [via]

A couple weeks ago, I asked for your help on trying to end the tipped (sub) minimum wage in New York State, so that more than 200,000 workers could get a raise. And lo and behold:

Acting state Labor Commissioner Mario Musolino accepted a state wage board’s recommendation to raise the cash wage for tipped workers to $7.50 per hour beginning Dec. 31, marking tipped workers’ first minimum wage raise since 2011.

Musolino accepted four of the five recommendations made by the wage board. He said he is in favor of putting all tipped workers under one class, allowing New York City to raise its minimum for tipped workers by one dollar if and when the Legislature approves a separate minimum wage for the metropolis, and reviewing whether to eliminate the cash wages and tip credits system…

For those of you who remember the original form email, that’s recommendations A-D, and rejecting E. It’s rare that you win a victory across the board, so celebrate!

(And just for added schadenfreude,”the restaurant industry called Musolino’s decisions troubling.”)

After fighting my landlords to allow me to have Itty I made the decision to move out of my current apartment to a place that will hopefully be safer for us. My landlords gave me permission to keep her right after I brought her home but I’ve been dealing with my downstairs neighbor threatening us since November. He has continued to show how scared he is of her by acting irrationally and has threatened to kill her twice since November.

While I fully expected that people would be nervous around her, since pit mixes are constructed as inherently dangerous or aggressive dogs, what I didn’t expect was him trying to get her to react every time we were around. Not only forcing us to completely avoid any place he is in the building but adding to my own anxiety while living in this building.

Getting Itty was the best thing I’ve ever done for my own wellbeing, outside of deciding last year to live on my own instead of finding a new roommate. Having her around has allowed me to work through my anxiety and be more functional on a daily basis. She’s come so far since I got her and we are almost ready for her to pass her Canine Good Citizen exam. She’s turned out to not only be a great dog but so helpful to me personally.

As she’s progressed through her training, I thought that the passive aggressive behavior would stop if I gave it time and for a bit it did but at the end of January he yet again started acting out towards us and it made me decide to start looking for a new place to live. I thought it would be really hard to find a new place to live but instead I found a great apartment that is a little bit bigger not to far from where I’m living now. I picked up the keys last Friday and will be moving all of my larger things next week.

Not only did this landlord help me make sure the apartment was mine, he even said in the spring they may put up a fence so Itty has a place to live. It will take a bit to get everything back to normal once I move but I’ll be happy to be in a building where Itty and I don’t have to deal with violent behavior or worry about living in unsafe conditions.

I didn’t want to move and I’m doing it on almost nothing, as I am living on very little right now as a grad student, but I think this move will be the last one for a long while. At least until I know what I’m doing after I finish my masters.

As always, connect with me on tumblr and twitter.

misandril:

empressque3n:

this is how friendships end

She had to find her own ride home after that

Shorter Verbatim Rudy Giuliani:

But I can only be disheartened when I hear him claim, as he did last August, that our response to 9/11 betrayed the ideals of this country. When he interjected that “we tortured some folks,” he undermined those who managed successfully to protect us from further attack.

And to say, as the president has, that American exceptionalism is no more exceptional than the exceptionalism of any other country in the world, does not suggest a becoming and endearing modesty, but rather a stark lack of moral clarity.

So, to be clear, “moral clarity” means “torture and arbitrary detention are awesome when the United States does them.” And “American exceptionalism” means “the United States should be unapologetic about torture and arbitrary detention, like North Korea and Saudi Arabia.” Or the Soviet Union:

All of which is a roundabout way of saying the Soviets also had a strong sense of exceptionalism. It was something that was carefully nurtured and encouraged by The Party and had been spread successfully from the Kremlin to the remotest drunk-tank in Kamchatka.

But the problem with exceptionalism is that it can turn unintentionally comic with the drop of a hat. You’re made to believe you’re at the center of an envious universe, but then the world changes just enough and suddenly you’re a punchline clinging to a lot of incoherent emotions. I watched this happen with my own eyes to a lot of people in the former Soviet Union.

And I feel like it’s happening here now, with Rudy and the rest of the exceptionalist die-hards. They’re hanging on to a conception of us that doesn’t really exist anymore, not realizing that “America” is now a deeply varied, rapidly-changing place, one incidentally that they spend a lot of their public lives declaring they can’t stand.

Supprting torture isn’t the only way you can be a true patriot, of course. You can also unironically cite Robert Heinlein as a model democratic theorist…

I awake to find that many people are complaining that the unconventional Boyhood — which I loved — lost to another “system” film, Birdman, which I also loved.

But in all seriouness — what the fuck?

A darkly comic film by a Mexican director who elevated what in lesser hands would’ve been pure gimmick into art is just typical Hollywood system fare?

Even though Boyhood should have won based on its extreme audaciousness, in any other year, every who’s complaining this morning would have been overjoyed to see Birdman rewarded for its merely mundane audaciousness.

I love to complain as much as the next guy, but no one was robbed this year — at least not in the “Best Picture” category.

Shorter Glenn Reynolds and Kevin Williamson: you can love the United States, you can oppose any significant portion of the 2012 Republican Party platform, but not both.

I will say, though, that he might be on to something with his assertion that “even those who are, at first, repelled by Giuliani’s argument may find doubts lingering, and perhaps even growing, as they look at Obama’s presidency in a new light.”   I, for one, am extremely frightened by the prospect that the smears of a steadfast patriot and moral giant like Guiliani will get more attention.  Surely, people will start to think stuff like “if Obama loves the United States, why won’t he show how much he cares by, say, nominating an incompetent mobbed-up crook to head the Department of Homeland Security?”  And I don’t think the Democrats can survive this. Please, please, Scott Walker: don’t endorse his comments rather than ducking the question.

Fans of classic British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf will recognize these nifty micro creations by Elspeth De Montes as the titular mining vessel and it’s diminutive companion Starbug. Note: Any readers that complain about the absence of the Blue Midget risk being branded as a… smeeeeee-HEEEEED!

Not surprisingly, anti-union groups have responded to reasonable moderate Sam Alito’s call for a good case to overturn the 1977 Abood decision that allows public sector unions to charge fees in lieu of dues for non-union members that they represent and would otherwise be free riders on the contracts they negotiate. Whether the Court overturns Abood remains in question since that’s a more radical move than just chipping away at it, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

clintscoffeepot:

“Depression turns you into a series of nouns, without the adjectives and without the verbs. You don’t remember where you misplaced your descriptions, your actions … You become: bed, shower, socks, coffee, keys, obligations.”— A Series of Nouns

you don’t create  n e w  w o r l d s to give them 
      all the same l i m i t s  as the old ones

It looks as if the labor dispute between the longshoremen’s union (ILWU) and west coast ports is about over, as Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez has been working hard to find a solution.

Like so many strikes, the concern trolls have come out in great numbers, complaining that the ILWU is selfish and won’t sacrifice for the rest of the American working class, such as this USA Today editorial. Of course, it’s not as if when these workers aren’t striking the media elites are trying to help the working class. But when workers do anything that might inconvenience anyone, no matter how justified the reason, the media blames them. Like Kristof claiming that he now supports union despite some stagehand making $400,000 a year, USA Today pulls out the age-old card of complaining that these blue collar workers make so much money that they are the problem, without stating what it thinks is an appropriate wage for workers.

And it isn’t just the media, this is common throughout society. Remember the BART strike in San Francisco, when supposedly liberal residents turned against the union because it took a labor action. Why is it that labor solidarity only goes one way–labor sacrificing for the general public and never the other–the general public understanding the necessity of the occasional labor struggle that will raise standards for the whole working and middle classes of an area. Instead, as a society we almost always only talk about strikes in terms of greedy workers causing problems for me, ignoring the benefits of good union contracts for all of us.

Mark Brenner counters:

Newfound concern for workers across the economy has everyone from the FedEx CEO to the Editorial Board of USA TODAY howling over port congestion. They blame unionized workers for everything from dwindling auto parts supplies in the Midwest to french fry shortages in Japan.

It’s a depressingly familiar bait and switch. Pay no attention to the billions in profits shippers are raking in, or the fact that it’s the port operators bottlenecking cargo by cutting shifts and closing ports for days on end. Instead, blame the workers laboring in this difficult and dangerous occupation because they still carry a union card and their wages don’t hover around the poverty line.

Longshore workers on the West Coast earn $26 to $41 an hour, and they have excellent health care and retirement benefits. In short, they have the kind of jobs we need more of — jobs that allow working-class men and women to buy homes and send their kids to college free from crushing debt.

These standards aren’t the result of enlightened corporate decision-making. They are the product of struggle. Longshore workers have fought for 80 years to get a fair share of the fruits of their labor. Today’s standoff is just the latest battle.

With the new labor agreement, I’m sure USA Today will now dedicate itself to improving the lives of the American working class to meet the good wages and benefits of the ILWU….

Walmart has announced a pay raise for its workers.

The company said it would pay even its lowest-level workers at least $9 an hour starting this spring, comfortably above the $7.25 federal minimum wage, and push that to $10 in 2016. The company also said it would strengthen a “department manager” role, giving it a minimum wage of $13 per hour this year and $15 next, thus offering low-wage hourly workers a clearer path to advancement. Including similar bumps at Walmart-owned Sam’s Clubs, the company expects 500,000 workers to receive a raise at a cost of $1 billion a year, executives said in a conference call with reporters.

This is why organizing efforts like the United Food and Commercial Workers’ campaign with the Walmart workers is so important. UFCW is rightfullly taking a good deal of credit for this. The bad publicity the company has received for its poverty wages, for holding food donation drives for its own workers, for making pregnant employees work with dangerous chemicals, and so many other awful corporate behaviors has made a difference. While the Times article linked above suggests this is Walmart responding to a tightening labor market, I am highly dubious that this is the only major reason for these raises. After all, it’s not like the early 2000s when fast food chains were offering signing bonuses for new workers. The labor market is still pretty bad for a lot of workers. Rather, it’s more likely that the fear of losing those workers to slightly better paying jobs combined with the need for Walmart to get some good publicity.

And as Mariya Strauss discusses, this is very much a publicity move, part of a larger pattern of the company to make cosmetic changes in its business practices whenever the criticism of its practices generate particularly poor publicity. After all, it’s not like $10 an hour is some great shakes. In many states and municipalities, minimum wage law is moving to and above $10.

I haven’t read Steve Fraser’s new book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, but after reading this review, I sure plan to do so.

Fraser identifies a number of reasons why Americans acquiesce to the class warfare of the New Gilded Age:

Fraser explains the economics of decline effectively. The working class may have abandoned Marxian “class struggle,” but, he says, the capitalists haven’t; they have pretty much won the class conflict by destroying labor unions. But the problem for him goes beyond economics; the disappearance of the left-wing political imagination is his real concern. His analysis thus focuses mostly on the cultural and ideological.

He points to the distractions offered by consumer culture, “an emancipation of the imaginary and the libidinal whose thrills and dreaminess are prefabricated.” Consumerism and mass media offer pleasures that are private, that take people away from the political and social and economic grievances they share with others.

He emphasizes the particular idea of “freedom” that provides the heart of Republican Party ideology: Freedom in America is the freedom to succeed through individual initiative (rather than cooperative effort). Our heroes are the entrepreneurs, the “job creators,” and the enemies of freedom are the government regulations and taxes that shackle their creativity and energy (and which otherwise might go to serve social needs and the public good).

The ’60s maxim “the personal is political” meant that issues that seemed private — above all, women’s oppression — were in fact widely shared and required collective action to bring change. Fraser argues that what began as a call for liberation has today become a justification for avoiding the political, for substituting personal solutions for political ones: eat organic food, drive a Prius, send your kids to charter schools.

It’s an interesting thesis. As the review points out, Americans haven’t acquiesced on social issues–thus the gay rights movement, challenges to police violence, etc. But on economic issues, we have. And I think that’s right. Not all of us necessarily, but the capitalists did an outstanding job after the fall of the Soviet Union is discrediting even the slightest possibility that any system other than unrestrained American-style capitalism could work. Socialists were pushed back on their heels while class consciousness collapsed in American society (although it was already in decline since the 1950s). Horatio Alger myths have existed in American society since before Alger wrote them, but never before have so many people believed in them so whole-heartedly. And I don’t think student debt loads, economic stagnation, recession, and growing income inequality has really changed it that much, at least if my students are any sign.

The arguments about consumer culture and individualism I think are particularly interesting. I don’t think consumerism and resistance are necessarily counter to one another, but there is something about a society where even that resistance is heavily individualized and where one wears their politics not on their sleeve, but on their arm like a new tattoo that shows their own personally crafted politics for them. This highly individualized politics empowers people to resist on one level but also empowers them to drop out if the movement they’ve joined doesn’t take this or that position. Occupy did a lot but this atomized individualism is a big part of the reason why the same spirit and same problems didn’t allow it to continue and then didn’t reignite in some other way.

Anyway, I’ll try to review Fraser’s book for the blog and explore these issues in greater detail.

blackfoxx:

blackfoxx:

The white male style of debate is to antagonize you until you snap. Then they win by default, because they make up their own rules in which being upset automatically invalidates your argument. The key is also to argue about things that they have no stake and experience in, so they dont snap first. Of course in the event that they do snap first, its of course passion, not anger…

White people are like little kids who make up new rules and obnoxious powers to keep themselves from losing….

At the end of it all, they are happy that you are so civil and can debate things rationally and clearly without getting upset. Everyone shakes hands and thanks everyone for being able to discuss “conflicting” viewpoints. Because after all everyone needs to hear the opposing side to truly be sophisticated. Even if you’ve heard that side all your life and it completely devalues you as a human being.

What i hear is that the mark of civilization to white people is being dehumanized and taking it like a champ. 

They also have little to no concept of power dynamics in these ‘sophisticated” discussions.

oldies but goodies

This reminds me of a study done about conspiracy theorist comments online (specifically 9/11 truthers).  The study found that anti-conspiracy commenters tended to be more hostile than the conspiracy theory ones.  This was taken by conspiracy theorists and put all over their websites as proof they were more “sane.”  To the point that the author of the study actually needed to add a comment to the abstract of the paper correcting the misrepresentation of his study.

I find that this dynamic happens a lot between people who argue in good faith (i.e. expecting a debate to involve actual understanding of what other people are saying, discussing the actual points, etc) running into people who are absolutely certain of their point of view and do not read or care what the other person has to say, or who aren’t operating in good faith at all (trolls.)  When you bang your head against the wall continuously of somebody just going “nuh uh”, it gets frustrating, and people tend to get angry.  The “wall” can be either because they’re arguing from a privileged position where it doesn’t matter to them if they’re right or wrong because ultimately it doesn’t affect them, or that they’re just trolling, or that they believe so strongly that they’re right without proof (like a conspiracy theory) that it doesn’t matter what you say they know they are right.

Plus, all the other stuff mentioned above about how race and gender (and other factors) affect people’s perception about whether anger is irrational or justified, and how angry people are allowed to get before they appear “too angry."  And some ablism thrown in about how if you get too emotional, you appear "unstable” therefore you cannot be trusted to be a reliable narrator.

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