Memory Foam never forgets

heatherbat:

deerishus:

I can’t resist centaurs have been all over my dash lately, so i’m starting a group of teen punk centaurs with dyed tails and bad words shaved into their sides, and studded jackets and spiked horseshoes YEAH. YEAH.

omg punk taur. best.

"I feel powerful."

kylafrank:

Crows speak in murder, don’t you know? 

belfryoddities:

Monday is the last day to see the wonderful art show by Henrietta’s Eye!

https://www.facebook.com/henriettaseye

https://www.etsy.com/shop/HenriettasEye

https://www.flickr.com/photos/henriettaseye/

A wonderful art show by people who are astonishingly talented. At one of my favorite stores! If you’re in the Seattle area, you should go check it out.

the-bearded-professor:

slobbering:

She just described 99% of Tumblr

…and all of my favorite subjects.

She’s pointing at separate books on only one shelf. What sort of library is that? Each of those topics need at least one shelf each. 

goodbyeandthanksforallthefish:

Glitches in the Matrix

Offices are dangerous.

bearpigman:

"They should be fired and fined for their misconduct while in uniform" I WILL LET THE IRONY SINK IN

 

jamesfactscalvin:

this

skelenabones:

i’m gonna print this out as a sticker

gohoneycocolove:

Chris Rock just said the most insightful thing on race 

“ So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”

http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/chris-rock-frank-rich-in-conversation.html

Photo by Wetzel Wetzelino

cliffe:

ryanestradadotcom:

I have had the honor of working on two different comics projects with Don Hertzfeldt. Flight, and Fusion Future. But this is the story of my first interaction with the man.

Best possible answer

micdotcom:

The 85 richest people on Earth own as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest 

Follow micdotcom

A secret message encoded in a sculpture at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, got one step closer to being solved last week. Creator Jim Sanborn disclosed one of the words in “Kryptos,” a brain-racking puzzle that’s gone unsolved for nearly a quarter of a century right at the doorstep of America’s intelligence center.

“Clock” is the hint, one of the words covertly nestled in the 97 characters of the unsolved code. As the New York Times noted, this joins “Berlin” which Sanborn revealed in 2010, possibly referencing the curious “Berlin clock,” or Mengenlehreuhr, a 1975 German timepiece designed by Dieter Binninger that tells the hour by illuminated colors in a system derived from set theory. Sanborn reportedly coyly replied to the theory, “sounding pleased”: “There are several really interesting clocks in Berlin.”

Now before you dust off your enigma machines and put on a pot of conspiracy-strength coffee, the “Kryptos” sculpture, which made its debut in November of 1990, has already driven some of the greatest codebreakers to obsession, along with a host of ambitious amateurs. The first three messages were solved early on by NSA cryptanalysts (here’s a detailed breakdown of each), through a Vigenère cipher, one of the crytographic systems to come out of the Renaissance. However, the shortest message in the nearly 1,800 letters pocked in the copper sculpture, waving out from a trunk of petrified wood like a missive from a prayer scroll, has proved the most difficult.

According to Wired, other than Sanborn, only two other people were thought to know the solution, but in fact Sanborn disclosed in 2005 that he hadn’t given them the real messages at all. While the artist has several other coded sculptures, including those installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, “Kryptos” remains the most frustrating. The clue happens to coincide with the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred while he was working on the piece. Since the November timing of the sculpture’s installation proved to have bearing on previously solved messages, perhaps there’s meaning in the new hint beyond Sanborn’s impatience for its solution.

In the aftermath of the injustice in St. Louis County, the riots and protests are going to obscure the macro and micro evils the murder of Mike Brown by Darren Wilson have re-illustrated.

After Prosectuor Robert P. McCulloch declared there would be no indictment conservatives gleefully took to every media platform they infest to trumpet their unabashed glee, celebrating, as is their wont, the killing of a minority.

Once again we have confirmation of the despicable nature of conservatives. Right-wingers only support Law Enforcement Agencies and Officers when those agents are conducting one of three activites; undermining Leftist Protests, destroying Unions, and killing or incarcerating black men.

Recall that during Cliven Bundy Insurrection, Conservatives flocked to the area to shoot and kill Law Enforcement Officers. Cop Killer Jerad Miller spent 4 days at Bundy's Camp. Conservative Domestic Terror Groups detailed their plans to shot at Officers while hiding behind women and children.

Conservatives don't support the Rule of Law unless that Law is being used to murder minorities or oppress liberals.

For instance the recent spate of Marijuana legislation laws being passed around the country would seem to indicate the pot is not a dangerous drug. But, in this case conservatives found comfort in an old canard, first proferred by William Randolph Hearst, Reefer Madness. Brown had smoked cannabis! Proof that Brown was high meant Wilson's non-lethal attempts were ineffectual! Cannabis is only a dangerous drug when blacks smoke it.

Of course, much of the right-wing defense of Darren Wilson was based on outright fabrications. Jim Hoft, the St. Louis based dumbest man on the internet hyped the "Orbital-eye socket blowout" injury Wilson supposedly suffered. Hoft and other conservatives bloggers posted and reposted a CAT-Scan which showed the broken eyesocket. It was proven the images used by conservatives bloggers was not of Wilson but taken from a University of Iowa medical textbook. Of course, this didn't dissuade the right-wing liars as they doubled-down on their lies and claimed it was illustrative of the injury Wilson suffered.

But, the real damage had been done because the Lie was in the conservative bloodstream and despite all refutations and evidence against conservatives would continue to parrot that Brown had savagely (purposeful word choice) beaten Wilson.

Now, with the Grand Jury decision we got actual photo evidence of Wilson. He suffered no injuries. His photos showed nothing more than a lip herpe and a popped zit on his right cheek.

Conservatives also hyped Brown's size as justification, Faux News going so far as to claim Brown could not be considered unarmed because of his height and weight. But, what was never mentioned was that Darren Wilson is no tiny wisp. But, while Wilson is 6'4 and 225+, he is a soft doughy disgrace.

This of course allowed Darren Wilson, that squishy slack-jawed wimp, to play up the scary black man defense. Brown despite being unarmed became the Hulk.

Wilson's Grand Jury Testimony, again designed by Prosecutor McCulloch to allow Wilson's "version of events" to be promulgated without cross examination, was a puerile collection of childish analogies.

Grabbing Brown was like a "5 year old holding onto Hulk Hogan", Brown was shrugging off the effects of the bullets and "looked like he was bulking up to run through the shots", while his face was "the most instense aggressive face" and "it looks like a demon". So pathetic was Wilson's testimony it was only to be outdone by the bullshit diary of "witness 40" which was submitted along with all the other mass of lies in order to confuse the Grand Jurors into coming back with no indictment.

It's been pointed out that Prosecutor Robert McCulloch did a fanastic job as the Defense Attorney of Darren Wilson and McCulloch may have been working out his own demons with this case. His father was a Police Officer who was murdered in the line of duty by a black man, while 4 other close family members have worked as Police Officers in St. Louis.

But, McCullochs goals are likely larger. He probably wants to be Attorney General for Missouri and aiding Wilson in escaping trial is a big shout out to white Missourians that they have a friend in McCulloch against the Demon-faced scary black man.

So... Wilson probably got away with murder. The physical evidence doesn't match with Wilson's testimony. The claim about the initial encounter and how exactly Brown "attacked" Wilson, the idea he spotted the cigarellos in Wilson's hand, why did Wilson try and present his weapon while seated in the SUV, the chase and the four times Wilson fired at Brown all of these incidents have enough inconsistencies to warrant further investigation. Nonetheless, I'm not going to guess at how the incident went down and we will never know the truth but, Wilson's entire testimony was crafted to make everyone believe he was in fear for his life.

And Wilson may have feared for his life in the end. But, in the end, Conservatives got what they wanted; freedom for a white cop who killed a black teenager.

Just a quick list of things that cops do when they're not shooting unarmed people who threaten them:

1. From New York, about a week ago: "A Southold Town police officer reportedly used pepper spray and a Taser to subdue a Greenport man who was allegedly drunk and attacked the officer Monday."

2. From Minnesota, in October: "In response to his resisting officers, Johnson 'was sprayed with department-issue chemical irritants and forced outside.'" That's Tom Johnson, backup defensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings, a notably large person.

3. From Massachusetts, in July: "Pepper spray had no effect on the suspect [who was on PCP and attacking officers] and it ultimately took numerous police officers and four sets of strung together handcuffs and leg shackles to get the man under control."

4. Finally, most poignantly, from Missouri, in September: "As the officer began to cuff the man, Turnbough reportedly turned and attacked him, tackling him to the ground and placing him in a choke hold." Another officer maced Jeffrey Turnbough, who had told police that he had a knife on him.

This list is endless. Not one of these men died attacking or resisting a cop, even though shooting them would have been faster and less painful for the cops being hit and strangled. In fact, most cops, when confronted with an unarmed, violent person, use mace and/or a Taser (since most police officers don't care if they're uncomfortable) and/or wait for backup.

Darren Wilson was scared. Scared people make stupid decisions that endanger others. Scared cops, apparently, get away with their stupid decisions. 

(Note: Remember that Wilson said he didn't want to mace Michael Brown when Brown was supposedly attacking him up close. But when they were out in the open, with distance between them? Why not? Why shoot instead of mace?)

Wow, but Ursula K. LeGuin is good.

samueldelany:

Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie, 1977, in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Because the text is so small, and a series of scans, it’s hard for people to read, and impossible for those with screen readers to, so me & aesmael have made a full transcription of it :) 

Transcription and my additional commentary below the cut:

Star Wars: A consideration of the great new S.F. film
by Samuel R. Delany

My first reactions as the final credits rose on the screen?  “Now what happens?” - which is to say George (American Grafitti and THX-1138) Lucas’s Star Wars is about the fastest two-hour film I’ve ever seen: I thought I’d been in the theater maybe twenty-five minutes.

    THX, if you’ll recall, looked like it was sired by Godard’s Contempt out of the space station sequence in Kubrick’s 2001 – i.e. it was basically white, white-on-white, and then more white.  What is the visual texture of Star Wars?

    Two moons shimmer in the heat above the horizon, and the desert evening fades to purple rather than blue; into the starry black, huge and/or hopelessly complex artifacts flicker, flash, spin, turn, or merely progress with ponderous motion; indoors is all machinery, some old, some new; while plastic storm troopers and dull grey generals meet and march; circus-putty aliens drink in a bar where what appears to be an automatic still gleams in the background with tarnished copper tubing; some of the spaceships are new and shiny, some are old and battered (and you get pretty good at telling the difference between the two).

    Motion: that’s the feeling you take away from the film more than any other.  People tramp, run, sprint; sand skimmers skim; spaceships race, chase, or careen off to hyperspace.  One ship explodes – cut to cloaked figure striding ominously forward, as if out of the explosion itself.  The door to a prison cell falls – cut to a booted foot falling on a light griddled floor.

    Intelligence and invention have been lavished on keeping the background of this film coherent and logical.  (This is perhaps the place to mention that – to get the film down from two and a quarter hours to a flat two – some sequences have been hacked out: two with young Luke and his friends at the beginning, during which one friend goes off to join the rebel forces, and one at the end where a space pilot tells Luke about his father.  In the middle too, we’ve lost a few aliens.  I hope Lucas is one of those guys who sends a complete copy of his films to the Paris Cinemathique before the distributors et al start chopping.)  The foreground is rather shaky.  But in this sort of science fiction, the job of the background is to be coherent; the job of the foreground is to be fast.  In that sense both do their job admirably.

    This film is going to do very well, if not phenomenally so, and I can see a lot of the elder statesmen in the sf community intoning: “That’s because it’s got a good, solid story!” Star Wars, as far as I can tell, has no story at all – or rather there are so many holes in the one it’s got you could explode a planet in some of them (about a third of the way through, one does); but it goes so quickly that the rents and tears and creaking places in it blur out.

    You know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are: you get told, in an introductory ribbon of text that diminishes towards the screen top – a homage to the Flash Gordon chapter synopses from the twelve-part Saturday afternoon serials of another age.  The main good guy is the dissatisfied young farmer, Luke Skywalker, played by an engagingly naive Mark Hamill.  Etymologists take note: the relation between Lucas and Luke is obvious.  But more too that the name George comes from the greek word georgos: farmer, i.e., “earth man” or “earth walker.”  George Lucas/Luke Skywalker, dig?  The film is a blatant and self-conscious autobiographic wish fulfilment on the part of its ingenious director.

    That Main Good Guy never gets a really direct encounter with Main Bad Guy (the towering and bemasked Lord Darth Vader, played by a sinister and practically invisible David Prowse) is the shakiest part of the plot.  Perhaps it’s just an oversight.  Or maybe material for a sequel.  The rumour, at any rate, is that a sequel is under way. Good Show.

    The dialogue in Star Wars is conscientiously heavy handed – that kind of humour where wha’ts so funny is the attempt at humour that falls so flat.  But sometimes it’s just clumsy: when Han Solo, talking about the speed of his ship comments something to the effect, “I made the Kessel run in under three parsecs,” the preview audience with whom I saw the film groaned in unison.  (A parsec, like a light-year, is a unit of distance, not time, i.e. 3,248 light years.) But despite the groaners – and Star Wars has its share (turbo-lasers? I assume that’s light that’s both coherent and turbulent at the same time … ?  Well there’re always “wavicles.”) - we loved it.

    A film is made in tiny, tiny, extremely complicated bits and pieces – and experienced as an almost total gestalt.  Very rarely can you locate any element from the gestalt in one and only one of the bits.  Nevertheless, some of the gestalt elements that worked extraordinarily well are worth nothing: the particular way the Unadulterated Mysticism of the film interweaves among all the blasters and spaceships and general machinery is very effective.  The variation in locations, planetscapes, starscapes, here desert, there deep space, over here jungle, over there urban spaceport, is what makes us believe in the vastness and the completeness of this universe.  And the glorious special effects, that are the entrance way into each of those varied views, are too effective even to be described.

    Thanks to those special effects, the worlds look big enough to be worlds.  For those who haven’t seen it yet, some advice: try to catch this one in a theater with a fairly big screen where you can sit pretty close.  With some films it doesn’t matter much, but on the purely visual level, Star Wars is all about size – relative size, variations in size, the way the very big can make the ordinary seem very small.  And a smaller screen will mute this quality.

    Lucas, like his fellow American Bogdanovich and the Italian, Bertolucci, is aware specifically of the history of film.  Last Tango in Paris had its little recalls of Vigo and Godard; What’s Up, Doc? Paid its loving tribute to Howard Hawks and Mack Sennett.  Lucas’s gestures to the science fiction film as historical genre may make somebody a Ph.D. some day.  Chewie’s marvelous head is for those of you who loved Planet of the Apes.  The robot C-3P0 is the “Maria” robot from Lang’s silent Metropolis, R2-D2 is first cousin to the little fellow trunding after Bruce Dern in Trumbell’s Silent Running.  I believe I recall the unextended-bridge sequence from Flash Gordon.  Certainly the last time I saw those alien clarinetists they were taking much more sinister roles in The Island Earth; and the Death Star interior, where Kenobi (played wisely by Alec Guiness (sic)) deactivates the Whoseywhatsit, makes a most reverential bow to that shafted city of Forbidden Planet.

    Also, I suspect Lucas rather likes Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (“… to the spice farms!”) a lot.

    But however many films and other allusions there are, they don’t intrude.  They are there for those who enjoy them; those who wouldn’t would probably never know they’re there.  From beginning to end, the movie is always colorful, visually energetic, and immediate.

    Could it possibly have been any better?

    You bet!  But to talk about how we have to talk about the real accomplishment of the film, which we haven’t till now touched on; and also show how the places where it falls short of that accomplishment show a lack of imagination, a lack of invention, a lack of engagement.  For that, we have to delve into a little theory, and talk about what’s been holding the “serious” sf film back till now.

    Somewhere around Brave New World and 1984 time, the Hollywood picture making mentality got fixed in its notoriously unsubtle, collective noggin that science fiction – all science fiction – had one and one message: In the Future, Things will be Flat, Uninteresting, Repressive and Inhumanly Dull.  Now there are only so many films you can make about the flat, uninteresting, repressive, and dull.  After awhile it makes very little difference whether you call it Alphaville or 1984, whether you make it pretty or stark, whether the dull gets overthrown at the end or endures.  How many times can you spend ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes where the filmmaker’s intention is to show you that things are dull and/or meaningless.  (This is not to be confused with the film the audience may find dull or meaningless because they can’t follow what the filmmaker finds interesting.  That is something else entirely, my friend!)

    Lucas’s is the first sf film in a long while whose basic assumption – in spite of the flatness of the evil Bad Guys and pure-hearted Good Guys (and tender-tough Good-Bad guys, like Han Solo, played almost antiseptically by Harrison Ford)  is that the future will be more interesting than the present. When something is interesting, pretty or colorful in Lucas’s film, we are not (as we are, say, in Logan’s Run or Rollerball) supposed to take it automatically and with no thought as a clear and precise sign for the Superficial, Meaningless, Meretricious and Tawdry.

    In addition to the play Lucas makes on his own name to generate Luke, the very texture and play of the film tells us Lucas would like to live in that future. Whatever the lessons this future has to teach us, about good and evil, about growing up or accepting courage, no matter how painful or unpleasant those lessons, this future is seen as a good place to learn them, a place where one will have a chance to apply them. It is not the future so many sf films depict, where things are so inhibited that, even if we learn something about life, we will never have a chance to utilize that knowledge  short of the place’s falling completely to pieces within seventy-two hours of our learning it. And assuming we are lucky enough [to] survive. In short, there are many ways in which Star Wars is a very childlike film. This is to the good.

    As frequently, however, it is also childish. And the childishness, whether in the dialogue or in the general conception, doesn’t work. It is not interesting. And it doesn’t come close to being exciting. Sometime, somewhere, somebody is going to write a review of Star Wars that begins: “In Lucas’s future, the black races and the yellow races have apparently died out and a sort of mid-Western American (with a few South Westerners who seem to specialize in being war ship pilots) has taken over the universe. By and large, women have also been bred out of the human race and, save for the odd gutsy princess or the isolated and coward aunt, humanity seems to be breeding quite nicely without them. …”

    When those various review surface, somebody will no doubt object (and we’ll recognize the voice; it’s the same one who said, earlier, “…it’s got a good, solid story!”) with a shout: “But that’s not the point. This is entertainment!”

    Well, entertainment is a complex business. And we are talking about an aspect of the film that isn’t particularly entertaining. When you travel across three whole worlds and all the humans you see are so scrupiously (sic) caucasian and male, Lucas’s future begins to seem a little dull. And the variation and invention suddenly tun out to be only the province of the set director and special effects crew.

    How does one put in some variety, some human variety? The same way you put in your barrage of allusions to other films, i.e., you just do it and don’t make a big thing.

    To take the tiniest example: wouldn’t that future have been more interesting if, say, three-quarters of the rebel pilots just happened to have been Oriental women  rather than just the guys who didn’t make it onto the Minnisota (sic) Ag-football team. It would even be more interesting to the guys at Minnisota (sic) Ag. This is science fiction after all.

    No more explanation would have been needed for that (They came from a world colonized by Chinese where women were frequently pilots? Possibly they came from a dozen worlds and volunteered because they were all historically interested in the Red Guard? Or maybe it’s just because there are, indeed, lots of Chinese women?) than we get for why there just happens to be an Evil, Nasty, Octopoid Thingy in the Death Star garbage dump. (It was busy metabolizing garbage? Maybe it was an alien ambassador who felt more comfortable in that environment? Maybe it just growed?) That kind of off-handed flip is what you can do in science fiction. In the film world in the present, the token woman, token black, or what-have-you, is clearly propaganda, and even the people who are supposed to like that particular piece of it smile their smiles with rather more tightly pursed lips than is comfortable. In a science fiction film, however, the variety of human types should be as fascinating and luminous in itself as the variety of color in the set designer’s paint box. Not to make use of that variety, in all possible combinations, seems an imaginative failure of at least the same order as not coming up with as interesting sets as possible.

    In any case, Star Wars is a delight. (For those people who like literary parallels, it brings the sf film up to about the Lensman stage.) But perhaps the most delightful thing about it is that it brings so forcefully to the imagination the possibility of sf films that are so much better in precisely the terms that Star Wars itself has begun to lay out.

I & aesmael wanted to share this because it’s a really good example of how you can review and criticize something that you also really enjoyed.  Liking something doesn’t mean it can’t have flaws, or you can’t recognize what’s so good about it that the flaws don’t detract from the immediate enjoyment, but that might detract from the overall enjoyment or analysis in the bigger picture.  Also, that criticism of pop culture movies for having  all white and mostly male casts isn’t a new thing that began with Tumblr or Twitter or “SJWs”, but is something that people have noticed in the past too, and made the same sort of critiques and criticisms.

Besides the analysis of the lack of racial and gender diversity in Star Wars, this piece is also a great analysis of Star Wars as a film in general, and what’s good and bad about it specifically from a science fiction perspective.  And it’s interesting also to note how views of Star Wars have changed as the other movies have come out to put the first one in context (especially after Lucas adds in the “Episode IV” subtitle to Star Wars which wasn’t in the original theatre release, hence the criticism that Star Wars feels incomplete as Luke and Vader never actually have a face-to-face confrontation.) 

Anyway, we thought this was a cool thing for people to read, and we wanted to make it more accessible to those who can’t or would have trouble reading it (it was a strain on our eyes to read and to transcribe.)  And a great example of how one can really love and enjoy something yet be aware of and criticize it’s weaknesses, including through a lens of social justice.

Project ROSE stings end in Phoenix, AZ, Monica Jones responds

As you may you know I was arrested under an anti-prostitution sting, by the name of Project ROSE. This program used police and prosecutors to round up sex workers, and people profiled as sex workers, forcing them into diversion programs using coercion. The head of this program is Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, a social work professor at Arizona State University School of Social Work in Phoenix, Arizona.

Using coercive tactics such as those central to Project ROSE contradicts everything social work stands for. Social workers are supposed to defend social justice and free will. Using police to round up sex workers robs them of their self-determination and dignity and thus goes against the code of ethics of social work.

As of today, I have been advised that no more Project ROSE events are planned, and Project ROSE will not be conducting any more police stings, hopefully permanently.  This is a milestone in the community’s struggle to end the injustice of Project ROSE and rights violating policing of this kind. We still have further to go. The next milestones to reach are getting the “manifestation statute” off the books and getting my conviction overturned.

Thanks to the ACLU, SWOP-Phoenix and Best Practices Policy Project for their work for social justice and all my other supporters in Arizona and beyond.

Monica Jones, November 26, 2014

Content note: This post discusses emotional abuse

In the latest in a string of policies which sound good and are incredibly cheap to implement, Theresa May will announce plans to put emotional abuse on a par with physical domestic violence. This sounds like nothing to object to, a long-awaited recognition of the seriousness of the coercive dynamics which so often sustain abusive relationships and hit survivors hard.

There is a catch, though, and it’s a catch which means I severely doubt that any perpetrators will find themselves prosecuted for something they have blatantly done: the whole thing hinges on telling the police.

The way the police tend to work is through talking about what happened. You list specific incidents. This happened, and then this happened, and then that happened. Imagine having to do this as a survivor of emotional abuse!

The very clever thing about emotional abuse, the thing that really helps abusers keep things going is how petty it sounds if you recount a blow-by-blow history of what happened to you. I’ve never gone into detail about what I experienced in an emotionally abusive relationship, because under the flicker of gaslight, it all sounds rather ridiculous. I could tell you all about some drama involving a duvet or how I needed to watch what my face was doing during sex, but to be quite honest, I’m embarrassed to speak about these things, because everything would require so much detailed explanation of the entire context, and when boiled down to a story it still all sounds quite trivial.

Emotional abuse is a pattern which is hard to explain, and reinforced by abusers making you feel like everything is silly and you’re overreacting.

I wouldn’t explain what happened to me in an incident-specific format to a friend. Hell, it took a lot of time for me to open up about these things to a therapist because they sounded so probably-nothing to me. So why the fuck would I want to speak to a hostile police officer about all of this? The police are known to suck at talking to vulnerable women at the best of times, and this is a situation which is so intrinsically delicate that I cannot imagine any survivors wanting to take the leap and report to the cops. The effects and mechanisms of emotional abuse just present too much of a barrier to this happening.

What would actually help survivors of emotional abuse a lot more is one of the strongest weapons against abusers: knowledge for everyone. Emotional abuse is so little-understood, and that needs to change. An informed populace, with the level of knowledge about what emotional abuse is and the understanding that sometimes what sounds trivial and petty is anything but, could join forces with survivors against abusers. It would be so much easier to fight emotional abuse if we started from a position of supporting and believing survivors, knowing that what might sound like nothing is probably something, especially if she’s taken the step of speaking out.

It would all be so much easier if we could see the difference between little squabbles and emotional abuse, but the problem is that our culture normalises coercive control in relationships to the point that these things are indistinguishable to us. Survivors know the difference, and we should listen to them.

I don’t expect the government to get working on tackling emotional abuse in a way that would actually work, any more than they tackle other forms of violence against women. I have no faith in them; they’re not the route. So we must hack around them, supporting survivors in the way that they want us to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fitness and health and muscles and frankly it’s really hard to dig out useful advice and tools from the snake oil being peddled. I’m reasonably fit, but I’m not what anyone would call to get workout tips, either.

But kegels? This is the kind of fitness I know something about.

LOOP, which is running an IndieGoGo campaign right now, is one of the new not-a-sex-toy cunt toys in this increasing trend of pelvic exercisers. We’ve had ben wa balls or Betty Dodson’s barbell for exercising these muscles, but nothing that provides direct feedback about how we’re doing. Knowing how strong those muscles are, and if I’m getting stronger or weaker, really helps keep me on track to keep on it.

Plus if I can’t rip someone’s dick off with my cunt, I’m just not trying hard enough right?

The LOOP comes with a little bamboo bag, and you download an app in order to save the data you receive. That data allows you to train in ways that work for you, as well as seeing if you can beat your own scores. All this for $90 if you pay into their IndieGoGo campaign- not too shabby, considering similar ones cost over $150. Betty’s Barbell is $125, and doesn’t even give you feedback, so there we go!

I love kegel exercising because I love when I can clamp down on a lover’s cock and see them shudder. I love having control over letting someone’s fist into my cunt. Also I enjoy that by having all these fun sexy inspirations to keep up with my kegelcising, I also won’t be as likely to struggle with incontinence later in life, but that’s not nearly as fun an incentive as the shudder my lover gets when I can grip their cock or hand with my cunt muscles.

I like that LOOP isn’t designed to go double duty as a vibrator, actually. I think focusing on it as a health tool makes more sense- the expectation that a data extraction implement will also get you off often seems to end up in a product that doesn’t do either particularly well. I do want to point out that not all owners of cunts are women, and that not all women have cunts, and I hope the creators will consider editing their copy to reflect that.

I’m curious to try this out when it’s ready. I for one welcome our cataloguing of data relating to sexuality… it’s about damn time, to be frank, and I’m glad to see it becoming more accessible!

Do you do kegels? What works for you? Have you noticed a difference?

Taylor Swift is a profoundly sentimental artist. She is also, of course, a gifted songwriter, a clear, convincing singer, a striking melodist, a hook machine as irresistible as any to grace Top 40 radio, a celebrity about as benevolent as they come, and, let us not forget, a role model worth obsessing over. But before any of that we Taylor Swift fans must acknowledge her penchant for schmaltz, as this earnest young woman who writes directly and openly about her feelings has a saccharine streak about a mile wide. When asked why one loves Taylor Swift, it is easy to mumble some excuse about expert craft or formal mastery. The reason we fans adore her is much more specific, more thematic. We adore her because she falls in love with guys when they hold the door open for her, which anybody else would interpret as a meaningless act of common courtesy. We adore her because when she meets her new lover in a café and he tells her about the movies he watches with his family every single Christmas she feels all warm and fuzzy inside. We adore her because she projects an innocent, radiant delight in the world that could make you believe in faith and magic.

Whether Taylor Swift the real-life human being is actually like this is somewhat implausible, nor does it particularly matter. Swift has become a megaplatinum superstar largely through the construction of an artificial but rather appealing character. To call her the girl next door would downplay the dizzy self-involvement and feisty autonomy that made her a star in the first place; no girl next door is that thin or dresses that well. But as epitomized in “You Belong With Me,” in which she positions herself as the more downhome, easygoing darling in sharp contrast with her high-maintenance romantic rival, Swift has consistently played throughout her career an intriguing cross between Everygirl and Ingenue. Few have put this much effort into such a shimmering illusion of normalcy. However naturalistic the detail in her well-plotted love stories, her turns of phrase come rather close to familiar cliché, and ultimately her narratives trade in idealized archetypes rather than individual instance, especially the ones that deal specifically with high school or life in a small town — from “White Horse” to “Last Kiss” to “How You Get the Girl,” from the song where she and her boyfriend are Romeo and Juliet to the song where she and her boyfriend fall in love over the summer listening to Tim McGraw. She is modest, ordinary, and picture-perfect; she is much less sexual than most female pop singers, but she’s also in touch with her feelings and she takes them seriously. And although her new album has been marketed as a mature, adult move away from girly vulnerability as well as a radical musical reinvention where glitzy synth-pop replaces mild country-rock, listen twice to 1989 and you’ll hear the same wholesome voice, the same hopeless romantic getting excited and angry and blissfully happy.

Possibly the hookiest and most immediate album she’s ever made, 1989 culminates a career that started with roots in the homely comforts of country and/or mall music and slowly gained the universal power of the best masspop as Swift sharpened her writing and fed her insatiable ambition. It’s not her artistic peak, I don’t think; that would be 2012’s Red, an unequivocally great album that snuck up on me months after I had mentally filed it away and that I now love as much as anybody ever. Red sold a million copies in its first week, too, just like 1989. But unless she returns to country and/or mall music after her present electroexperiment, which might not be such a bad career move, the new album seals a formal progression that seems inevitable in retrospect and leaves her with plenty of places to go. Complete with feigned drawl and aching pedal steel, 2006’s self-titled debut Taylor Swift was a fairly predictable corporate country record, yet you can already hear her toying with the teen-nostalgia theme as of the first song and lead single, “Tim McGraw.” 2008’s megacrossover breakout Fearless and 2010’s somewhat overproduced Speak Now streamline her product, subsuming the twangy elements into a slick, flavorful country-tinged pop vehicle that equaled radio gold. Red perfected the aesthetic, in which that same pop vehicle expanded to include sugary keyboards, plucked banjo riffs, calm acoustic strumming, intensely defiant kissoffs and heartbreakingly sad ballads, emotional hormonal giddiness all over the place, its homely comforts so reassuring and pleasurable, its masspop reach so punchy and fierce. 1989, cannily marketed as her first real pop album when in fact she’s never done anything but, strips down her sound to a light blend of synthetic beats and automated drum machines. Gone are the warm, cozy songs that you could curl up to on a rainy day with a cup of tea and a blanket. This is urban dance music through and through.

Swift’s songwriting has remained expressive, passionate, amazingly heartfelt and romantic. She continues to specialize in sketching spectacularly entertaining relationship catastrophe, and her narrative tropes are no less conventional. “Out of the Woods” especially hits you with the kind of broad emotional force that has always been her gift. But on the whole her lyrics have become more concise and less specific, and her melodies bounce along with a spare elegance she’s never approached before. She’s cheerier than usual, thrilled by her fresh popstar power and less inclined toward introspection. Where she used to hammer her choruses home with the energy of a natural arena-rocker, now she glides and soars on the liquid momentum of her bubblegum beat. Her strummed guitar riffs have been almost completely excised, replaced by a snowballing procession of chewy keyboard hooks. This music seems coated in polish, gleaming even more brightly than most Top 40 material, defined by a glossy surface the artificiality of which is barely diminished by the depth underneath, and her tunes slip into your head more easily than ever. She announces her newfound commitment to electropop with the opening “Welcome to New York,” which has nothing to do with New York and everything to do with those magnificent, glittering synthesizers that open the album with a bang.

As with so much commercial pop music, everything on 1989 is deliberate. Each chiming keyboard figure, every click of the drum machine, all the breathy sighs in her voice, these have been fanatically labored over by Swift and her production team. Each moment on the album has been calculated to push your buttons, and in this 1989 is perhaps not so different from her earlier work after all. Taylor Swift’s schmaltzy side, more readily apparent in her country-identified music but nevertheless always there deep down, toys with your feelings the same way her tightly constructed melodic pop songs toy with your pleasure receptors. Her music is manipulative in the technical sense of the term: engineered to make you feel specific and premeditated things. Swift shares this knack with dozens of lesser songpoets and cheesy Hollywood screenwriters, and she is shockingly good at it. To listen to a song like “All Too Well” and follow the protagonist, identifying with her at every turn, celebrating her joy and shaking your head in solidarity when the world lets her down, feeling the exact tones of winsome nostalgia that she does, at the same time grinning at the verses before beaming at the chorus, this is to embark on a sentimental journey whose path has already been mapped out for you. Both the heartsongs of her Nashville period and the mechanical machinations of her newly dominant synthpop work like this. For some impossible number of reasons — her friendly, ordinary yet distinct persona, her embrace of young romantic mythology, her honest emotional immediacy — Swift can somehow turn this kind of kitsch into something enchanted and beautiful.

And if you allow yourself to be manipulated by her superb craft, she will take you to special places indeed. Because of its plastic surface and jingly one-dimensionality, 1989 admittedly severs all connections with her previous country and/or mall music phase; no longer is she an artist who would release The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection. But Swift’s personality, energy, and tendency to write songs like confessional diary entries have by no means changed along with the music, and the overall effect is much the same. Just like Red, just like Fearless, 1989 paints a sweet, escapist fantasy of adolescence as an idyllic time. She puts on a nice dress and stares at the sunset, she falls for a guy with that James Dean daydream look in his eye, she gets drawn into young and reckless love affairs. She dances to her beat forevermore, she waxes lyrical about her love, she lives her wildest dreams. This is what both teenpop and so much country music are about, and her attraction to both genres and ability to fuse them makes perfect sense. Always the songs she sings are so glowing, so elegantly conventional, so rosy and romantic, it’s like she lives in a fairytale world right around the corner, which adds to the emotional impact; these songs tug on your heartstrings and make you long for the paradise they depict in such heavenly detail. They actually achieve the eternal youth that rock & rollers have forever been chasing, not to mention the delightful melodicism and surefire hook power that pop aesthetes crave.

1989 will sell a million more copies before the year ends, “Shake It Off” will stick in everybody’s heads for months after that, and Swift will once again have triumphed on a masspop scale. Bitter cynics and the militantly anticommercial will hold out as long as they can, gritting their teeth, desperately trying to resist the musical pleasure they know awaits them. Everybody else will just shrug and enjoy the record. By the standards of a Taylor Swift album, 1989 is simpler and less rich than her norm, both musically and thematically. But there’s a neat, fascinating beauty to its simplicity that’s surprisingly persistent and easy to listen to. Clear as day, its melodies ring out brightly through the air.

1989 and Red are available from Amazon and other retailers.