Sophianotloren

fannypaxfax:

catinahatgoin-rata-tat-tat:

nizzerd:

“I’m a black kid. Try to teach me about slavery without me feeling resentment towards white people.”

His face though…

This is fucking gold.

He’s mad because they were telling the kids the truth?

Sudden Orgasm

maximushka:

As the work on the next edition of Black Venus portraits continues, I am scheduling photo sessions and looking for natural women of African descent to be my subjects. The project, and subsequent book, is about celebrating black women from all walks of life. Mothers, mothers-to-be, daughters, sisters, wives, girlfriends, rebels — women of all shapes and sizes, younger and older, are welcome. No modeling experience is necessary.

All shoots take place in Charlotte, North Carolina. Please contact me via Tumblr, Facebook or Instagram for details and lets make beautiful portraits!

* Reblog now for a chance to win a copy of the final book!

China was, and will always be, in its heart of hearts, an empire — whether it is royal, revolutionary, or techno-bureaucratic-communist-cum-capitalist. First and foremost this is what China Through the Looking Glass — possibly the largest show in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s history comprised of 140 pieces from the 1700s to now — celebrates in its gorgeous, over-the-top, utterly fabulous way. Though more discretely billed as part of the department of Asian Art’s centenary that includes nineteen exhibitions and installations in over fifty galleries of Asian Art throughout the year, this is the centenary’s most splashy, killer app. Andrew Bolton from the museum’s Costume Institute (formerly of the Victoria and Albert Museum) explains the show is about “the impact of Chinese aesthetics on Western fashion.” The exhibit showcases, among other things, a collaboration and bromance between Bolton and Wong Kar Wai, a Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker who won the 1997 best director film award at Cannes for his film Happy Together, a love story about a pair of gay expatriates living in Buenos Aires. Wong also presided as president of the jury at both the Cannes Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, bestowing on him some serious cinematic chops. Also included in the exhibition’s mix is production designer Nathan Crowley, known for his work on the movies Interstellar and The Dark Knight.

If you start at the lowest level (the show is dispersed throughout the Chinese Galleries and the lower level Anna Wintour Costume Center) you are immediately surrounded by a darkened video tunnel flanked on either side by two wall-sized projections of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 multi Oscar winning film The Last Emperor, accompanied by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s yearning, nostalgic soundtrack.

The video terminal leads up to, like the Wizard of Oz, a presentation of the authentic, yellow imperial festival robe of the last Emperor of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) Henry Pu Yi, worn when he was a mere four years old. This mis-en-scene introduces the aptly titled theme of the show “Through the Looking Glass” derived from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, where Alice dives through the mirror into a made-up world. Both Bolton and Wong note the aura of fantasy is “far from authentic,” but instead of dispelling typical Orientalist stereotypes and dealing with racial, gender, and power imbalances, the curator and his various collaborators have decided to embrace them to the hilt. As viewers ensconced in this worldview, the show is so well put together you might as well go along for the ride.

Imperial robes are paired with Western haute couture, with enormous mirrors constantly playing a trickster role. Some of the robes on display are stitched with the twelve imperial symbols worn by Chinese emperors. The British milliner Stephen Jones was commissioned by the museum to commit a royal court taboo by riffing off these symbols with his modern headpieces for the mannequins.

A Chinese artist friend from Beijing gave me a bit of needed cultural perspective, saying the show was for people who knew nothing about China, or for ex-pat Chinese who had not been back to the mainland for 30 years. For mainland residents the show is just a display of China’s myth of itself, which means the show contained no surprises for her, though she was happy to see Western people enjoying themselves, and proud of the respectful presentations.

It’s not just the imperial empires that are represented, it’s also the other modern dynasties that followed including the Republic of China (1912–49) and The People’s Republic of China (1949–present). The Shanghai films from the 1920s to the 1940s play a big role as clips from notable Chinese directors like Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Ang Lee, and of course Wong Kar Wai are looped again and again, representing “women of style” like Hu Di (Butterfly Wi) Oei Huilan and Soong Mei-Ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek). I saw a number of elderly Chinese stare at the film clips in awe and wonder, surprised to see moments of their youth flash by on huge LED screens inside a Western museum.

The modern qipao or cheongsam, a type of dress derived from imperial robes and styled with a more modern ideology was a fashion beacon mostly before World War II. The dress was most exemplified by Paramount Studios costume designer Travis Banton in his dress for Chinese actress Anna May Wong’s role in the 1934 potboiler film, Limehouse Blues.

Situated in the Met’s calligraphy gallery are two simple dresses from the early 1950s, one by Coco Chanel and the other by Christian Dior. The fabric, covered in Chinese calligraphy is actually, and hilariously about someone’s dyspeptic digestive issues.

Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, first exported into the West in the 16th century was later ‘reorientalized’ by the Chinese themselves. Guo Pei, the designer who created the much maligned and celebrated “Rihanna dress” for the Costume Institute Gala has her blue-and-white, porcelain-inspired dress situated next to those by Roberto Cavalli, Alexander McQueen, Giambattista Valli, Galliano, Valentino, and Rodarte. As if to ratchet the porcelain metaphor up a notch, Red Gate Gallery’s Li Xiaofeng shows his actual porcelain piece, “The Weight of the Millenium,” a contemplation, as he put it in a mailing sent by his gallery in Beijing, on the emergence of the Mongol Yuan capital Khanbalik as a “blue snake that has been hibernating for a millennium,” saying the porcelain shards represent the “splendor once crushed … (and) illusions flowing with sorrow!”

The Met’s Ming dynasty-inspired Astor Court with its scholar’s garden is the most jaw-dropping installation in the show. Nathan Crowley created a moonlit oasis with a gigantic moon projected on the ceiling and reflected back in a pond of water, surrounded by seven mannequins wearing his spring 2003 Christian Dior Haute Couture Collection and Maison Martin Margiela repurposed costumes, a combination of a fantasy of Beijing opera, the Queen Mother of England, and Kabuki style ideals all inspired by the performances of the renown Chinese opera performer Mei Langfang.

In another gallery, a special bamboo garden of 20-foot high Perspex plexiglass rods lights from the bottom with LED lights to create a simulated Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon effect. In the installation, martial arts-inspired figures show British menswear designer Craig Green’s spring 2015 collection.

The People’s Republic of China will always be equated with the Zongshan suit, which actually came from Sun Yat-sen, but is known as the Mao suit, after Chairman Mao Zedong. It is the embodiment of utopian ideals and the last type of clothing that screams China. Mao and Mao’s wife Jiang Qing with her kitschy Red Guard ballets spawned the art of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), inspiring Andy Warhol, now revered in China, to print paintings of Mao in 1972, right after Richard M. Nixon visited China. That act ultimately resulted in Warhol’s rather anonymous 1982 visit to China. The photo of Mao he used came from the 1964 portrait ensconced in the Little Red Book, and inspired Zhang Honglu to print his own Chairman Mao series, of which I have seen gracing the fabric on people’s couches in Beijing. For her 1995 spring/summer collection, designer Vivienne Tam used Zhang’s images to make a dress pulsating with Mao’s images.

If you go along with the fantasy and the spectacular theatrical effects, and the notion of museum as Alice in Wonderland meets Disneyland with a dollop of nostalgia, you will have a fine time at this gorgeous show. If you are going for anything smacking of critical inquiry, take a raincheck.

China Through the Looking Glass continues at the the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Ave, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through August 16.

Originally posted 2015-05-25 10:13:55. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

jada stevens sheena shaw school source: droolingfemme.

I know a lot of you have questions about the book deal I just agreed to, so let me just do that “fake interview” thing I do to answer some of the big ones. Let’s begin, shall we?

Wait, what happened? Sorry, I was really high last night.

Fair enough. Here’s the story in the New York Times, and for those of you who don’t want to click through, here’s the headline:

Holy shit!

Yes, that was my reaction, too.

Dude, that’s like… a lot of money.

It is. Mind you, it’s spread out over a decade and thirteen books. And I only get the money if I actually, you know, write the books. But, yeah.

Is the deal some sort of record?

Don’t know, don’t care. Certainly people in genre (and out of it, obviously) make more per book. And it’s entirely possible that people have deals encompassing more books. In aggregate, yes, it’s unusually big. That said, the deal here isn’t about counting coup on other writers; I don’t care how much anyone else makes and if they make more than me, then good for them. It’s about something else.

What is that something else?

Stability, basically. Tor and I have decided to be long-term significant partners with each other. One of the very good things having a long-term relationship affords is the ability to plan, strategize and build on previous works and strengths. Or to put it another way, we know we’re stuck with each other until 2026 at least. Better find a way to make it work for both of us.

Also, I’m not going to lie: For the next decade I know where my money’s coming from. For a writer, that’s some nifty job security. Especially with a daughter coming up on college. Not having to search for a new book deal every book or two means I can spend more time writing, which I think is the thing we would all like me doing.

Thirteen books is a lot.

It is, but again, it’s over a decade. Between 2005 and 2015, I published seventeen books: eleven novels, five non-fiction books, and an anthology, which I edited and co-wrote (if you include The God Engines and Unlocked, novellas published as standalone books, the number goes up to nineteen). So based on previous history, this is a doable thing.

So, do you have thirteen books in your head?

As it happens, when I went in to talk to Tor about this, I presented the folks there with a proposed release schedule for the next decade, with synopses of every book. So, yes, I do. Will every single book I’ve proposed hit the shelves? Probably not; there’s flexibility for us to read the market and take advantage of what’s going on as it happens. But it’s always nice to have a plan.

What’s the plan, then?

The highlights:

* A sequel to Lock In, the title of which I shall now reveal exclusively here — Yes! I am giving myself an exclusive! — as: Head On;

* A new epic space opera series (two books planned at the moment, let’s see where it goes from there) in an entirely new universe;

* Another book in the Old Man’s War series (this one might be a few years, though, so be patient);

* Several standalones (or least, intended as standalones, but then OMW was intended as a standalone, too);

* Three Young Adult books.

Wait, YA?

Yes! YA! Because I love YA, many of my favorite writers are in that field, and I have ideas that are best suited there. I’m really excited about this part of the deal.

Note well that I have no illusions that I am just going to waltz into the YA field and be successful — it’s a different writing field with different conventions, and one great way to screw up is to think “eh, it’s for kids, how hard can it be?” (Hint: really hard.) But I’m looking forward to the challenge.

So now we know what you make as a writer.

Well, you know what I’ll make from this particular deal, before royalties. There are other revenue streams: Audio isn’t covered in this deal, for example. Neither are foreign language sales, or film/TV. Plus there are royalties from my previous books. And so on. I do all right.

Is it awkward to have people know about your finances?

Not exactly but it has interesting social echoes. I used to talk about how much I made as a writer because I think it’s important that writers do talk about money — silence about money only works to the advantage of those who are paying writers (or not paying them, or paying them insultingly little, as the case may be). But after a certain point I stopped talking about my earnings publicly because Krissy wasn’t comfortable with it, and because after a certain point it stops being useful to other writers and starts looking like bragging. I don’t want to be that asshole.

At this point, there’s no reason to be overly coy about it, so I’ll note that I’ve been making mid-six figures a year for a while now, much (indeed most) from book sales. The deal is a reflection of that track record; please don’t be under the impression I would have gotten the deal if Tor didn’t think it could make that money back and then some. It also means I’m an outlier when it comes to book sales/income and I know it.

I’m comfortable with people having some idea what I make, but outside very specific circumstances (like, uh, this one), you probably won’t see me talk about it other than very generally.

Can I borrow some money?

No.

But dude, $3.4 million!

Yes, but, I don’t get it all up front; that would be irresponsible of Tor. I get some of it up front, but probably not as much as you might think. Most of it I get like any other writer does — when I turn in the novel, and then when the novel gets published. This is a decade-long deal. The money comes in over all that time. I’m not going to be doing a Scrooge McDuck-like dive into a pool of coins, sorry. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a ton of money. Just broken up into manageable chunks over ten years.

So yeah, sorry, random Internet dudes. If you want my money, you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way: Kickstart something I want to back.

Why are you sticking with traditional publishing! Think of how much money you could have made self-publishing!

Yeah, thanks, no. One, for various reasons, I find it doubtful that I would be making more self-publishing. I’m not going to go into those reasons at the moment because it’s a long slog, but, you know. Trust me on this for now. Assume I know my business pretty well after all this time.

Two, look, I like to write, and I don’t mind marketing myself. But there is a whole lot more that goes into producing a book than just showing up with a manuscript and then telling people about it. I don’t want to do any of the rest of that stuff. That’s why publishers exist. That’s what publishers do. As it happens, when it comes to science fiction, Tor is as good as it gets, in every department. They are better at these things I don’t want to do than I am. I am delighted to partner with them and let them handle all that. I am clearly making enough money.

Three, if I want to self-publish something, I can, and have in the past. So, false dichotomy in any event.

You should probably thank people now.

You’re right! I should! At Tor, obviously, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Tom Doherty, for being willing to work long-term with me on these books. My agent, Ethan Ellenberg, did some amazing work and earned his percentage and then some. At home Krissy and Athena have had to deal with me freaking out rather a bit over the last couple of weeks, and did so without hitting over the head with a shovel.

And also, clearly, I need to thank anyone who has ever bought a book of mine. They added up! You rock.

I have now run out of questions to ask. 

That’s fine. The comment thread is open for other people to ask questions they might have.

Variety reports that the great comic actress and writer Anne Meara has left the stage. She was 85. If you read the article, you will be astonished at what a rich and full career she had, working almost continuously since … Continue reading →

The War After the War
by Debora Greger

for Greg Greger

I

Where were the neighbors? Out of town?
In my pajamas, I sat at my father’s feet
in front of their squat, myopic television,
the first in our neighborhood.

On a screen the size of a salad plate,
toy airplanes droned over quilted fields.
Bouquets of jellyfish fell: parachutes abloom,
gray toy soldiers drifting together, drifting apart—

the way families do, but I didn’t know that yet.
I was six or seven. The tv was an aquarium:
steely fish fell from the belly of a plane,
then burst into flame when they hit bottom.

A dollhouse surrendered a wall, the way such houses do.
Furniture hung onto wallpaper for dear life.
Down in the crumble of what had been a street,
women tore brick from brick, filling a baby carriage.


II

What was my young father,
just a few years back from that war,
looking for? The farm boy from Nebraska
he’d been before he’d seen Dachau?

Next door, my brother and sister fought
the Battle of Bedtime, bath by bath.
Next door, in the living room,
a two-tone cowboy lay where he fell,
too bowlegged to stand. Where was his horse?
And the Indian who’d come apart at the waist—
where were his legs to be found?
A fireman, licorice-red from helmet to boot,

a coil of white rope slung over his arm
like a mint Lifesaver, tried to help.
A few inches of ladder crawled under a cushion,
looking for crumbs. Between the sag of couch

and the slump of rocker, past a pickle-green soldier,
a plastic foxhole, cocoa brown, dug itself
into the rug of no man’s land
and waited to trip my mother.


III

Am I the oldest one here? In the theater,
the air of expectation soured by mouse and mold—
in the dark, a constellation of postage stamps:
the screens of cell phones glow.

And then we were in Algiers, we were in Marseille.
On foot, we fell in behind a ragged file
of North African infantry. Farther north
than they’d ever been, we trudged

straight into the arms of the enemy:
winter, 1944. Why did the French want to live in France,
the youngest wondered while they hid,
waiting capture by the cold.

They relieved a dead German soldier
of greatcoat and boots. Village by muddy village,
they stole, shadow to shadow, trying to last
until the Americans arrived—

as if, just out of range of the lens,
the open trucks of my father’s unit
would rumble over the rutted horizon.
Good with a rifle, a farsighted farm boy

made company clerk because he’d learned to type
in high school—how young he would look,
not half my age, and no one to tell him
he’ll survive those months in Europe,

he’ll be spared the Pacific by Hiroshima.
Fifty years from then, one evening,
from the drawer where he kept
the tv remote, next to his flint-knapping tools,

he’d take out a small gray notebook
and show his eldest daughter
how, in pencil, in tiny hurried script,
he kept the names of those who died around him.

In the late 1850s, the Massachusetts writer Oliver Wendell Holmes invented the hand-held stereoscope, a contraption that allowed two slightly different images to be viewed together three-dimensionally. The device revolutionized the world of photography, as any middle-class family could purchase one for about $10 in today’s money. Photographers soon began trekking out to exotic locales like Niagara Falls to shoot stereoscopic images, which were printed on cards and sold commercially in shops by the hundreds. And predictably, Americans went crazy over them.

“This is a world lit by fire. There was no electricity, and everybody rode by horseback, but you could take pictures,” Bob Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography, said recently in conversation with Hyperallergic about the Library of Congress’s acquisition of stereoscopic images of the war. In the early 1860s, demand for battlefield scenes exploded, and big-name photographers like Alexander Gardner — a protégé of Matthew Brady — made a lot of money supplying it. “There were even stereoscope stores on Broadway,” Zeller said. “I call them the Blockbuster videos of Civil War America.”

The majority of the negatives produced by large stereo print companies still exist in impressively good condition, and they’ve long been held by the library and the National Archives. But there’s a less common breed of stereoscopic images that enthusiasts tend to drool over: the ones made by small town producers, for which very few prints were made, and for which the negatives no longer exist.

Remarkably enough, the Library of Congress has acquired 540 of them. They were purchased from Robin G. Stanford, an 87-year-old grandmother from Houston, Texas, who’s spent the past four decades doggedly collecting them. Stanford told The Washington Post her hobby began in the 1970s, when she was looking for unique ways to decorate her farmhouse. “And you know how it is with collecting,” she said. “You put your toe in the water, and next thing you know, you’re paddling like crazy.” She hadn’t planned to sell the images, but her son died unexpectedly and she needed money to help out her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. “I would not have sold any of it if it hadn’t been for that,” she explained.

Among the collection’s many gems, Stanford managed to compile more than 50 images taken by an obscure photographic duo named Osborn & Durbec. They opened a small shop in Charleston, South Carolina in 1859, and for the next three years photographed everything from slaves working on sprawling plantations to the bombardment of Fort Sumter before the war permanently interrupted their operation. Zeller said that in his three decades of studying civil war photography, he’s only come across a handful of them for sale.

“[The collection] is just the legacy of a lifetime of very active, aggressive collecting and what that can yield,” he said. Now, the library has made the fruit of Stanford’s labor available online for anyone to peruse and enjoy, and Zeller has undoubtedly spent hours doing so. “There are two photographs that I think are probably the first photographs of black church in America,” he mused. “There’s a photograph of the outside of the church, and then [the photographers] took their cameras — this is 1860 — inside the church and photographed the service, so you see the slaves worshipping in this little chapel. It’s just stunning.”

I keep saying I’ll write more poetry. But then I don’t get most of the things done that I want to, need to, whatever… not these days. Still homeless. Still staying with The Rabbit up in the hills. Still barely coping.

Wrote this the other day — edited slightly for the blog here:

---

There are so many things I need help with. And most of them I can clearly articulate the ways I need help, and why — I have all that completely worked out.

Filed under: General

There’s a game called “Rust” in which you play a character in a wilderness. When it first came out, everyone was assigned the same avatar: a white dude. As we all know, “white dude” is the default everywhere, so no one complained.

Then, in an upgrade, they added other avatar options: different faces, different skin color. As an interesting experiment, these options were not under player control: they were randomly assigned. White dudes logging in suddenly found that their avatar might be a black dude (still a dude, at least; female avatars aren’t yet available).

White dudes freaked out.

If the skin color is forced on you, you won’t like it…OK, where were you when everyone was forced to play a white dude?

Not trying to be racist, it just comes naturally to you, I guess.

You don’t want to “take the chance of playing a black character.” Why? What would happen to you in the game? This is an entirely cosmetic feature, you know.

But please, self-awareness! Turn it around. Racism must be a big deal if the devs are MAKING PEOPLE PLAY AS WHITE CHARACTERS.

Here’s a lovely summary of what’s going on in this situation.

Why is it that the supposed lack of choice with regards to the player’s avatar only became a concern after people of color were added to the game? The reactions reflect a failure on the part of some gamers to recognize that whiteness is a race at all. These players appear to think of whiteness as a neutral type of embodiment, the universal category of humanity against which all those who do “have” a race (anyone who is not white) are compared. The backlash also confirms a theory posited by new media scholar Lisa Nakamura that, on the Internet, there is a tendency to assume that, in the absence of direct statements to the contrary, the people that we meet are white. Indeed, as Nakamura writes in “Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet”:

Until lately, the structure of the Internet has been such that it has greatly facilitated covering [or passing]; early utopians especially lauded and adored the Internet’s ability to hide or anonymize race as its best and most socially valuable feature. The Internet was just as much a machine for not-seeing as it was a machine of vision, at least in terms of race and gender identity.

In other words, by reintroducing the visualization of difference into the virtual world, Rust is making gamers question their racialized assumptions about the people they are interacting with online.

Making people question their assumptions…it’s like skepticism and critical thinking and all those good things science-minded people like to promote! I guess the problem is that white people must not be science-minded.

Oh, that’s not fair. We’re looking at a subset of white people in this example. Maybe it’s just gamers who are stupid.

moonblossom:

deluxetrashqueen:

Honestly, Rick Rolling is the best practical joke ever. Like, there’s nothing offensive or mean  spirited about it. It’s just like “Oops you thought there would be something else here but it’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.” which isn’t even a bad song. It’s fairly enjoyable to listen to. There’s no jumpscares, no screaming, no ill will. Just Rick Astley telling you he’s never going to give you up. I think that’s great. “You fell into my trap! Here, listen to this completely benign song that will have no negative effect on you.” 

I wish this were true. There’s a really good article about the problems inherent with rickrolling here.

If you thought traditional Japanese breakfasts were unusual, with their servings of fish, pickles, rice and soup, you’ll be in for a surprise when you see the new offering that’s coming to the table to greet you in the morning.

It’s time to say hello to the morning potato chip. Especially designed for breakfast consumption, these bags of fruity – yes, fruity – goodness are said to combine the energy-giving health benefits of the humble potato with two popular fruit flavours: peach and banana.

So how could these chips possibly fare as breakfast meals? Come with us as we head out into unchartered territory, pairing potato crisps with yoghurt, toast, and a bowl of granola and milk. Will the results be delicious? Read on to find out!

Currently on sale at convenience stores nationwide for 120 yen (US$0.98), these two unusual chip flavours will be hitting supermarket shelves from 1 June.

Opening the packets, we get our first glimpse of our morning meal. While they look like any other potato chip, the aroma’s certainly different. Rather than getting a big hit of salt, these give off a sweet, fruity aroma, more like a packet of gummies.

The banana crisps are covered in the powder of the fruit, giving them a slightly yellow hue. Koikeya, the company behind the unusual snack, prides itself on the fact that this chip variety has the energy-giving equivalent of 3.95 bananas.

The peach crisps, meanwhile, have a slight pink tinge to them and purportedly provide the same amount of energy as 3.73 Japanese-grown peaches. The fruity aroma of both these varieties is surprisingly alluring, even though it’s something we haven’t encountered from a bag of potato chips before.

Unlike more conventionally flavoured crisps, these ones contain unusual recipe ideas on the back of the pack. The suggested recipe for the banana crisps is marshmallow banana toast, drizzled with chocolate sauce.

The peach variety are said to pair nicely with fresh ham, alongside a cream cheese dip.

Having a quick look through the pantry, we found we were totally out of marshmallows and didn’t have any fresh ham or cream cheese. Instead, we decided to whip up a few inventive recipes of our own. We started off with our version of bananas on toast.

The first bite of this was, well, weird. From the look of it, there’s an expectation that this will taste like your regular chip sandwich. But then, the sweet banana flavour hits your tongue and everything gets thrown into disarray.

After a few bites, it becomes clear that this is a surprisingly good combination. The chewy texture of the toast goes well with the crunch of the potato chip, and the banana flavour permeates each mouthful, bringing a distinct sweetness to the bread. We can definitely see this working with marshmallows and chocolate sauce!

For our next course, what could go better with peaches than a bowl of fresh, plain yoghurt?

We decide to go for a ‘chips and dip’ style for this offering. The first bite made us laugh out loud, as the taste was exactly like a delicious peach yoghurt – only crunchy!

▼ Definitely a winner – thumbs up for yoghurt with peach chips!

Now, we’ve had granola with dried fruit before, so why not try them out with their nouveau chip versions?

We crumbled up both varieties of crisps and sprinkled them on top of an unsuspecting bowl of granola.

Adding milk to potato chips is certainly a first, but we had faith that this pairing might just work!

And it’s another surprising winner! The crisps work well as soft layers of fruit flavour, gently seeping out into the milk and making everything delicious. We can’t believe we’re saying this, but chips for breakfast actually works.

The verdict on Koikeya’s new fruit-flavoured potato chips? Strangely delicious! We must admit, we were dubious about this (as you probably still are!) when we started, but thanks to the minimal use of salt and the familiar fruit flavours, these work really well and are seriously pleasing to the palate. The only hurdle to get over is the fact that the product looks like something you’d normally snack on while watching a movie or with a couple of beers rather than your morning coffee.

Despite the unusual combination, these are a great example of the skill of Japanese snack manufacturers, who have an uncanny knack for blending some of the world’s most unassuming flavours. From past experience, these unique chip varieties won’t stay around for long, so get them now while you can!

Photos © RocketNews24

Origin: We mix banana and peach potato chips with toast, yoghurt and granola for a new Japanese breakfast
Copyright© RocketNews24 / SOCIO CORPORATION. All rights reserved.

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The Dial - 120/150cm - Charcoal and gold leaf on paper.

Joseph Loughborough

Like everything 90’s, the undercut is back- but this time with the addition of intricate designs. It’s a whole lot better than that time in 6th grade I asked for a peace sign cut into mine, and ended up with what was clearly a chicken foot scwaled into the nape of my neck.

Flickr faces complaints over ‘offensive’ auto-tagging for photos | Technology | The Guardian

Flickr is facing a user revolt after a new auto-tagging system labelled images of black people with tags such as “ape” and “animal” as well as tagging pictures of concentration camps with “sport” or “jungle gym”.

The system, which was introduced in early May, uses what Flickr describes as “advanced image recognition technology” to automatically categorise photos into a number of broad groups.

Come to Dinner photographed by Tim Walker for Vogue Italia, May 2015

In the last few months, I’ve found myself having several variations on what I think of as “the talk” with male friends and/or acquaintances. These guys have been people who have discovered that they have explicitly feminist leanings in the not-very-distant-past, who want to do more but are not really sure what to do with the generalized guilt that comes with feeling complicit for the failings of their gender. Since I kept repeating myself, I thought it would be worth writing about here.

So – dudes and dude-identified people! If the first paragraph sounds like you, then pull up a chair because it’s time to have “the talk”. (I promise it won’t be as bad as the actual “talk”.)

First: the pep talk that isn’t

You are going to fuck up. Accept that as a fact of reality. Gravity is a constant, the sun rises in the East, Taylor Swift’s music is pretty good despite that people like to make fun of it, and you are going to fuck up. Period. It is as inevitable as climate change or Fox News anchors being racist. You are going to fuck up. That may seem, on it’s face, a bleak statement to make. However, I give this knowledge to you as a gift to liberate you from fear.

As privileged people, we know that we shouldn’t engage in racist/misogynist/whatever-ist behavior. And fundamentally, everyone wants to believe that they are one of the good guys – that they are a decent human beings despite their faults! And as a privileged person who is starting to learn about feminism and social justice, sometimes that fear of fucking up can be paralyzing. Because you want to not to be like the other privileged asshats out there! You want to be better than that!

The problem with that way of thinking, however, is that taken to extremes, that fear can cause you to prioritize your fear of not wanting to be seem as [whatever]-ist over the feelings of real actual people suffering that real actual -ism. I’ve seen it happen, and it’s never pretty when it does. Because inevitably, it goes something like this:

Privileged person: [fucks up]

Marginalized person: Dude, you just fucked up.

Privileged person: How dare you! I would never fuck up! I’m a GOOD person, not some terrible, awful fuckup! You’re just a bully! A big stupid bully!

Marginalized person: [headdesk]

So instead of being “That Ally”, accept the inevitability of fucking up.

It does not give you permission to willfully be an asshat – you do still need to try not to fuck up; ironic sexism is still fucking sexism and it still isn’t okay. But fucking up doesn’t make you a monster, it makes you human. Accept that patriarchy has been imposed on you, just as it has been on everyone else. We are all participants in patriarchy.

Fucking up doesn’t make you uniquely horrible or monstrous – it’s simply a thing that people do every day. When it happens, acknowledge it with grace and apologize with sincerity. Then go forth and do better, always remembering that you’re not perfect. If you do really well, you’ll simply find new and different ways of fucking up.

You can choose to be depressed by all of this, but I offer it to you in the spirit of liberation – because the fear of being racist/sexist/whatever-ist and by extension a terrible person can be absolutely paralyzing, and it can take you to some deeply toxic places. So let it go, my friend. Let it go.

Next: Ally 101 – where to go from there

But, wundergeek! That’s it? That’s all I get? Just don’t fuck up, but have fun fucking up anyway?

Well. Yeah – kind of? I mean, there are a ton of resources out there on how to be an effective ally, many of which are pretty easy to find even with weak-to-moderate Google-fu. However, since I’ve also been seeing a lot of the same rookie ally mistakes that have been really getting under my skin, here are the absolute basics of the basics of the basics.

1. Learn to use Google

I appreciate that you’re probably sincere in your desire to learn more. But what you need to appreciate is that engaging with every probably-well-intentioned dude who wants me to give him a reading list to get him started down the path toward Being a Feminist (Ally) would be a colossal waste of my time.

I am not here to educate you. This blog explicitly states is not a 101-level blog and if there’s something here that you have trouble understanding, THAT’S WHAT THE REST OF THE INTERNET IS FOR.

That’s pretty much true for almost any other major feminist you can think of. We have SHIT TO DO that doesn’t include providing reading lists for any old rando who asks. So do yourself a favor and learn how to Google the answers you need. I PROMISE you they are easy to find.

2. Call men on their shit

When a man says or does something shitty in your presence, call him on it. You don’t need a lecture or a special technique or anything. Quite often, a “dude, not cool” will suffice.

Patriarchy is perpetuated by silence, so don’t be silent. As a dude, you have the automatic power of People Always Listening To You – a power most decidedly not conferred on lesser (read: non-dude) mortals[1]. With the benefits of patriarchy comes an obligation to use your power for good.

3. -ist jokes: JUST SAY NO

DO NOT make -ist jokes. Challenge people who make -ist jokes (when you can) in your presence. If you are not able to do so, say, because you work in customer service and this behavior is coming from a customer – refuse to laugh at -ist jokes.

Humans are social animals. The temptation to laugh politely so as to not make a scene will be there. Resist. Because “not making a scene” tells the -ist asshole YOU ARE ON THEIR SIDE

4. Don’t make light of or attempt to find the bright side of abuse

If you know someone who is experiencing sexist/racist/whatever-ist harassment or abuse, for the love of Christ don’t diminish it or try to make it humorous, because I promise you that there is nothing even remotely humorous about what they were experiencing. And yet twice this week I have talked with dudes who have attempted to “find the humor” in the misogynist abuse that I get through this blog. Because, you know – life is funny! Laugh it off! Because misogyny is just such a laugh riot and I should be able to shake it off!

So yeah. Don’t do that. You might think you are helping, BUT YOU ARE NOT. You are doing the opposite of helping.

5. STOP TALKING AND JUST LISTEN

Look, it can be hard when someone you care about or respect tells you about awful shit they are experiencing. It may be that your natural impulse is to jump in and try to help! Because you want to be a not-terrible human being! But that impulse? Sorry dudes – but mostly it is super unhelpful.

Look, as a dude just starting out in feminism I can pretty much guarantee you that any solutions you have to offer are not going to be original. The woman you want to share your “brilliant insights” with will not be awed or impressed, because she will have heard them before from every other well-meaning-but-unhelpful-dude who thinks that he has All The Answers. The thing you’re trying to fix is MY FUCKING LIFE. Which I have been living, all day every day for quite a long time now. I spend quite a lot of time thinking about it, seeing as how it’s mine, and I can promise you that the thing that popped into your head after two minutes of listening to me talk about my problems isn’t anything I haven’t already thought about myself.

So stop. Just. STOP. And listen. And when a response seems warranted, practice saying things that follow this formula (your wording may vary):

Expression of sympathy: “That must suck”, “That sounds hard”, “Wow – that’s bullshit” PLUS

Expression of regret: “I’m sorry you have to go through that”, “I’m sorry – you don’t deserve that”, “I’m sorry that happened to you” PLUS

Expression of (CONTEXT-APPROPRIATE) respect and/or appreciation: “You’re my friend and I have your back”, “I love you and I’m here for you”, “I admire your work and continue to find value in what you do”.

Then stop. Listen more. And repeat as needed. Because this? THIS is the shit that keeps me sane when I’m having a bad anxiety day, or when I’m so angry I’m trying not to cry, or when I feel like I just want to give up and walk away from it all. THIS.

Now go forth and do better.

[1] Reasons I have been told that I am not worth listening to in the last month include: I am “fat”, I am “ugly”, I am “unfuckable”, and I kill mens’ boners.

(440): I thought he was foreign, but it turns out when you're that drunk, an Ohio accent just sounds Russian.

[Note: I am the literal worst at titles. After staring at the title box for half an hour, I finally gave up and typed the first thing that came to me. I’m aware that it’s an awful title, but I give up.]

This post is actually one of the “big things” I’ve had in the works for a few weeks now; although it’s more “big” in the amount of work that went into it than in the “super-exciting” kind of way.

…I’m not really sure how else to introduce it, so I’ll just say that it’s a pretty personal comic and save additional commentary for the end of the post. The images are large and weirdly shaped, so I’m placing the rest of the post under a jump so that it doesn’t screw up formatting for people reading on mobile. (The resizing might make the text a bit hard to read, so you can click on the image for a larger, clearer view.)

…phew.

This is definitely the largest comic I’ve ever done. I made a lot of mistakes, and it didn’t turn out quite how I’d planned it, but I’m firm believer in “perfect is the enemy of good enough”. There are things that I do very much like about this, and I feel like it’s a pretty creditable effort from someone who’s never really done comics or comic art.

As for why I did this? I made this comic for a few different reasons. It originally started as an attempt to articulate (or rather, illustrate?) the difference between depression and anxiety – which is something I have struggled to do so far. The parameters of my depression are a known and familiar thing, but anxiety not so much, and it’s hard to have a conversation with the people closest to you about how they can help when you’re not even sure what it is you’re dealing with.

However, I decided to turn it into a comic/blog post because when I hear personal accounts from women like Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu describing their reactions to the abuse levied at them post-GamerGate, the things that they say sound familiar to me in terms of my own experience with online abuse and mental illness.

Also, I guess this is sort of a reaction against being called “brave”, which is a term that I really hate – because I don’t feel brave. I’ve never felt brave. Too stubborn for my own good? Sure. Bullheaded? Yup. But brave? Simply existing and having opinions doesn’t feel brave, and it feels wrong to be labelled as brave for the mere act of existence. No one ever tells men they’re “brave” to post combatively-worded opinions online, so why should I merit the designation?

“Brave” also has a way of making me feel alienated from friends and allies, who apologize to me for not being “brave”, because being “brave” is a good way to also get crazy. (Or in my case, crazier.) There’s a difference between being complicit and being realistic about knowing your limits!

That said, I’ll acknowledge that being public about my mental illness in this way is hard and scary and definitely a risk. It’s something that can be used to attack me, but worse – every time I speak out it feels like playing chicken with my relationships. It feels like saying “Do you still love me now? How about now? Am I too broken for you yet?” to everyone I care about, as if my life is somehow something that is subject to probation and periodic review for appropriate expressions of emotion. Because that’s where all of this has left me. A place where I don’t even feel I have permission to actually have feelings about stuff. At all.

Which is ultimately the biggest reason for why I made this, and why I’m hitting “publish” even though I desperately want to shove this away somewhere and forget it exists. Because we talk about “trolling” and “Gators” and “asshats”, but what the language fails to capture is that what’s at stake are actual fucking human beings.

You really really really want to click this link. Trust me.

(And yes, this is the Monday news, a little early.)

(And yes, I will write more about it. Probably tomorrow.)

I have a nasty cold but thanks to the magic of DayQuil I can at least give you a few links to funny videos.

My Drunk Kitchen, episode one:

Hannah Harto is an absolute genius at comedic timing. An incredible amount of work must go into editing these videos.

Jenna Marbles, Bounce That Dick:

Yes it’s three years old. It’s still funny.

zefrank, True Facts about the Owl:

There’s a whole series of these, they’re all pretty great.

Jake Jacobson III, Ylvis vs. Drowning Pool – Let the Foxes Hit the Floor

Not so much a video but you can’t tell me this isn’t funny

Henry Edmonds (animation),  Robert Clouth (music) – Boots and Cats

This will now be stuck in your head forever. If I were a better person I’d feel bad about that.

Mr Weebl – Badgers:

Electric 6 – Gay Bar:

Duck Sauce – Barbra Streisand:

Us vs Th3m – You can’t simple maths under pressure. A game, not a video, but it has a horribly catchy theme song that gets stuck in my head for hours

And if that doesn’t keep you entertained, there’s always Khan Academy. If you’re bored, why not go learn a thing?

Terrific article. The grim conclusion about this totally proactive new paradigm:

Ultimately, Arizona shows two ways that universities can respond to government defunding. They can become country clubs, or they can become “knowledge enterprises” that rely on the Internet to deliver education to enormous, geographically diffuse student bodies. Either way, the gap between the type of education available to children from affluent families and that offered to everyone else is going to grow. There was a moment in American history, says Newfield, when “the kind of thing that the Bush family could take for granted at Yale became possible at U. Michigan for somebody whose father was a middle manager.” That moment is over.

[Erik] See also Andrew Hartman’s essay on the Republican war on the humanities.

The public narrative of the cause for 2015 and the way forward has already been framed by the right wing of the party:

It failed in small-town England but advanced in London and big cities. It continued to lose working-class votes but bolstered its middle-class support. How to weave together a winning electoral coalition out of such fragmentation is far from straightforward. But you’d never know that from the response of Labour’s leadership candidates. Taking their cue  from Blair and a string of former New Labour luminaries, all have fallen in – with more or less enthusiasm – behind a Blairite agenda.

The problem with Ed Miliband’s leadership, they intoned from the start, was that it was “anti-business”, put a “cap on aspiration”, threatened rich people with punitive taxes, and failed to accept that the last Labour government “overspent” in the runup to the crisis of 2007-08.

However, the numbers are not on the side of the “modernisers” (a misnomer, given the modernizers are refighting the battles from 1992-1994).  John Curtice (a well known political scientist in the UK) suggests the problem with 2015 was in part the loss of support on the left:

 Britain’s most respected opinion pollster has warned Labour its chances of winning a majority at the next election verge on the “improbable” and that blaming its defeat on a shift away from Blairism is “wholly inadequate”.

Setting aside his pessimistic assessment for the future as I haven’t had the opportunity to explore those numbers at all (but will not be improved by the near certainty of a boundary review during the current Parliament) I do agree with the suggestion that a shift to the right would not enhance the electability of the party. Anecdotally, campaigning on the doorstep over the past two years, I haven’t once heard somebody tell me what the Labour Party needs is more Blairism. I have heard from many former Labour supporters who lamented that the party “has abandoned people like me”. I’ve also heard a lot of anti-immigrant vile, which as an immigrant myself are always my favorite moments (said without sarcasm) because invariably they don’t include me as a target for their life’s frustrations.

While Curtice focuses solely on the debacle in Scotland, the nearly 1.2 million Green Party voters also need to be included in any assessment:

If Greens had backed Labour in Derby North, Croydon Central, Bury North, Morley and Outwood, Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, Brighton Kemptown, and Telford, it would have been enough to deny David Cameron a majority, and Ed Balls would still be in his job. That’s just 2984 votes that would have needed to change hands.

Plymouth Sutton & Devonport is my constituency.  The Labour Party candidate, Luke Pollard, lost to the incumbent Conservative MP by 523 votes.  The Green Party candidate received 3401 votes.

I’m not arguing that the 2015 loss was the fault of the Greens or the SNP.  I am arguing that the Labour Party needs to make itself a more appealing alternative for those voters, one that combines addressing progressive issues and concerns with the chance of actually forming, you know, a government.

It’s Labour’s fault that many former Labour supporters voted for what they perceived to be a more attractive alternative. Embracing 1994 all over again will not get them back.

tinyhousedarling:

I think bikes with built in bars are the coolest!

marshmellowtea:

high-metafive:

so i made and account on tv tropes and it asked for my relationship status

i went over and was about to put in “single” or “it’s complicated” and, well..

i can’t deal anymore

this is beautiful