While this rendition isn’t going to get the same results as a real particle accelerator, I invite you to take a look at this fantastic LEGO version from Jason(JK Brickworks).
This “working” accelerator does in fact send a LEGO soccer ball around the track at 440 studs per second, or approximately 12.5 km/hr. Jason outlines some of the build in more detail on his blog.
I highly recommend checking out the video, too.
Here’s another blast from the past, this time from July 2012. Sadly, the link to Lily LLoyd’s blog is broken, but I like the think the post basically makes sense without it.
LilyLloyd wrote this amazing post about how “The whole born dominant bullshit is… well, bullshit”. It’s fantastic and you should read it right now. And it gets better! A Feminist Sub left this brilliant comment:
Really interesting post! I do have to say that I have a problem with the old Leather idea of bottoming as a step on the way to topping, because I think it conveys an idea that topping/domming is more valuable than bottoming/submitting. Like subs are simply people who couldn’t cut it as doms.
I don’t *think* that was the intended message with that tradition, but I do think that it’s contributed to domism in contemporary BDSM culture – I think the “standards” for calling oneself a dom are much higher than for calling oneself a sub. To be a sub, you just need submissive desires – to be a dom, you need credentials. Hence all the ranting about how there are no “real doms.” And I think that’s another reason that it seems like there are so many more doms than subs.
That blew my mind. It makes so much sense, but somehow I just never saw it before. Of course we don’t see submission as valuable in its own right if we treat it like it’s just a stage you go through before you reach the real goal of becoming dominant.
Why don’t we ever suggest that submissive/bottom type people try topping? We tell tops all the time that you should bottom before you top. It’s certainly true that there are lots of things you can learn by bottoming, but there are also plenty of things you can learn from topping. I can tell someone I really do want to hear about what my bottom wants until I’m blue in the face, but if they try topping it might click for them that’s it really is helpful to get some feedback.
Then again, it would totally destroy the dominant mystique if any lowly submissive could pick up a flogger and try it out for themselves. Anyone can bottom after all, it’s only the chosen few who can top. And if you actually believe that, there’s a Nigerian Prince who would like to speak with you, you poor stupid fuck.
Assuming that just anyone can bottom but topping is special is pretty much the dictionary definition ofdomism. With how passionately I hate the idea that I’m somehow more worthy because I decided to call myself dominant, I’m amazed and kind of disturbed that I never saw it before. I should know better, but I just didn’t see until A Feminist Sub pointed it out. This is how ingrained domism is in BDSM culture, and this is why I rail so hard against it when I see it.
My name is bspencer and I’m a dirty liar. A few days back I wrote a florid post saying I was taking a break from #GamerGate because it was taking its toll on my psyche. That was true. And I did take a break. But it was a short one, and after a couple of days I was back at the hashtag, getting my fix like some huffer who’d just stumbled upon an unattended pile of metallic Krylon.
The truth is I can’t quit #GamerGate.
So the way I see it, GG is a toxic stew of aggressively stupid and/or ignorant teenagers who now have a lot (cont) http://t.co/UzVr6C7ZkM
— bspencer (@vacuumslayer) November 5, 2014
A couple weeks ago my son and I were watching a series about reptiles. It was hosted by David Attenborough. During the intro, there’s a quick cut of Attenborough watching two huge tortoises mating. It’s weird. You wonder how he’s feeling. Like…does he feel awkward? Is he stifling a laugh? And thinking about that cut made me think about #GamerGate. Watching #GamerGate is like watching reptiles awkwardly mate–you don’t know whether to laugh or be disgusted. You don’t know if you want to keep watching or turn away. But somewhere along the way, I decided to be GG’s David Attenborough: I decided to stay and watch.
I’ve combed through that hashtag searching for signs that I am even 1% wrong about its inhabitants. But I’m not. I’m 1000% right. It’s a movement based entirely on driving feminist women and feminist allies out of gaming and shutting up feminist women who critique games and game culture.
The best thing about GG’s longevity is that its supporters–who are an incredibly unwieldy lot–have given up the pretense that’s about “ethics in journalism.” On any given day, every other tweet says in language even GGer’s can understand that the goal is to drive feminists and “Social Justice Warriors” out of gaming and gaming criticism.
Everyone knows it’s a cesspool. Everyone outside its bubble sees it the way I do: as a daycare gone rogue with toddlers running around smearing the walls with poop. Everyone who’s cool hates #GamerGate. Everyone who matters hates #GamerGate. But like many toddlers GGer’s think any attention is good attention, so the daycare continues to teem with excitable, poo-smearing toddlers. I think it may be time for that to stop. I think that we all need to just stop paying attention to GG. Because if we do, soon it will just be a room full of toddlers sending nasty emails to Gawker babbling to each other and proudly showing off their baffling Microsoft Paint graphics poop-drawings.
I promise this time I’ll go first. I promise I’ll stop giving it attention. Then maybe the toddlers of GG will finally get tired and go down for their naps. Boy, do they need one.
In 1952, an American attaché in Moscow was innocently fiddling with his shortwave radio when he heard the voice of the American ambassador dictating letters in the Embassy, just a few buildings away. He immediately reported the incident, but though the Americans tore the walls out of the Ambassador’s office, they weren’t able to find a listening device.
When the broadcasts kept coming, the Americans flew in two technical experts with special radio finding equipment, who meticulously examined each object in the Ambassador’s office. They finally tracked the signal to this innocuous giant wooden sculpture of the Great Seal of the United States, hanging behind the Ambassador’s desk. It had been given as a gift by the Komsomol, the Soviet version of the Boy Scouts.
Cracking it open, they found a hollow cavity and a metal object so unusual and mysterious in its design that it has gone down in history as ‘The Thing’.
‘The Thing’ had no battery, no wires, no source of power at all. It was was just a little can of metal covered on one side with foil, with a long metal whisker sticking out the side. It seemed too simple to be anything.
That night the American technician slept with ‘The Thing’ under his pillow. The next day they smuggled it out of the country for analysis.
The Americans couldn’t figure out how ‘The Thing’ worked, and had to ask the British for help. After a few weeks of fiddling, the Brits finally cracked The Thing’s secret.
That little round can was a resonant cavity. If you shone a beam of radio waves at it at a particular frequency, it would sing back to you, like a tuning fork. The metal antenna was just the right length to broadcast back one of the higher harmonics of the signal.
The resonator sat right behind a specially thinned piece of wood under the eagle’s beak. When someone in the room spoke, vibrations in the air would shake the foil, slightly deforming the cavity, which in turn made the resonant signal weaker or stronger.
As the attaché discovered, you could listen to this modulated signal on a radio just like a regular broadcast. ‘The Thing’ was a wireless, remotely powered microphone. It had been hanging on the ambassador’s wall for seven years.
Today we have a name for what ‘The Thing’ is: It’s an RFID tag, ingeniously modified to detect sound vibrations. Our world is full of these little pieces of metal and electronics that will sing back to you if you shine the right kind of radio waves on them.
But for 1952, this was heady stuff. Those poor American spooks were up against a piece of science fiction.
Today I want to talk about these moments when the future falls in our laps, with no warning or consideration about whether we’re ready to confront it.
Another amazing talk by the creator of Pinboard. I first heard Maciej speak at XOXO, he blew me away. This transcript of his Webstock talk was also amazing.
Technically outside the scope of this blog, but this was way too interesting/cool not to share.
By modern standards, the inclusion of two women in this Dungeons and Dragons ad was a surprisingly bold move -- a kind of sad snapshot of our lost, pre-Reagan/Thatcher/Pinochet/Mulroney-era past.
(via Seanan McGuire)
Conservatives are such fun people. They can’t let a holiday go without turning it into part of the culture war. The American Spectator clearly planned this one for awhile:
Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers kill kids rushing to become adults. Is it too much to ask of the ghoulish trio to apply their talents toward adults rushing to become kids?
The grownups who have decimated the ranks of trick-or-treaters by aborting 10 million of them in the last decade offer penance for their sins against Halloween by dressing up in place of the missing children. The National Retail Federation estimates that adults will spend $1.4 billion on their own Halloween costumes this year. That’s $1.4 billion that they could have spent on man-cave clubhouses, a huge birthday party, a collection of Care Bears, or some other pastime recently favored by adults.
Whining about adults spending money on costumes instead of doing what Real Americans are supposed to do–breed and raise new conservatives–is the height of how to connect with the broader public.
Meanwhile, this does not make sense:
Society appears beset by myriad identity disorders and too eager to label the clear-headed confused. A recent story highlighted the alleged racial confusion of well-mannered, well-spoken, well-educated Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. Men now dress up earnestly as Milton Berle once did for laughs. But age, not race or sex, plays as the role that confuses the culture most.
But the real problem is, of course, abortion. Because we kill all our fetuses, we have to compensate by staying children ourselves. Or something:
The decimation of the ranks of children leaves us with fewer kids and more adult imitators. The lucky ones protected in the womb grow up overprotected outside of it. An adult-surveilled childhood responsible for structured playdates, chauffeured trips to school, and digital babysitters shielding youngsters from the fresh air may also be responsible for the delayed childhoods of adults earlier denied them. It’s also hard to not conclude that a society mired in gadgets and amusements quite naturally favors frivolity. And marriage, an institution known to quickly mature its partners, elicits more “I don’ts” than ever.
Surely the National Parent sets a bad example here. Pajama Boy, that cradle-to-grave sponge “Julia,” and the health-care act regarding 26-year-olds as dependents entitled to coverage from their parents’ insurance plans all recast adolescence long beyond its biological boundaries—25 is the new 12.
Yes, nothing shows the depravity of our abortion culture like allowing 25 year olds to have health insurance!
I am feeling a bit off the normal page today. Today is my Minotaur husband’s last day at work — he is retiring. I admit, superstition and fear are ruling my morning. Both of us are a bit flighty this week, expecting some disaster to ruin our plans for a new post-0330 til 1830 life. Because yes, that has been his work day hours for most of our married life. So, I restlessly tossed and turned last night, worried about his final day.
He took yesterday off to help with some household things, but even that didn’t go as planned. He speared the palm of his hand with a screwdriver! It has long been a joke how accident prone he is at all matters of home and garden, but I was horrified that changing out a light switch required a visit to Urgent Care, pain meds and antibiotics. (I’m trying unsuccessfully to comfort my anxiety with another bit of superstition, an old saying of “Blood has been shed, the danger is passed.”) We picked the 31st of October as the end of work for symbolic reasons — most of my fellow pagans celebrate this day, not as Halloween, but as Samhain.
Samhain* is celebrated by some as a Celtic New Year. My Samhain is next weekend, not this one — but New Year it is and the week leading up to it is always profoundly moving in terms of portents and memories wafting out of my mind and memory like scents from a mythical witch’s cauldron. Our married world will turn this next week, once he gets home safely today and I can stop sweating. (Is the difference between a premonition and superstition that at the end of one you say “Well, I knew something was happening!” and after the latter you go “Well, that’s OVER with, thank goodness!”??) His focus, for the first time ever, CAN be on his marriage and home life.
But there is always a worm in the apple, they say. I know a lot of women who suddenly hate having the man under foot if she is (like me) already home from the paid work world. I admit, I have some trepidation going there. My Minotaur defined himself by his work life; home is where he hung up his brain with his hat. Thus his accident proneness here — home is where he didn’t need to focus and engage. I expect an adjustment period where he thinks I am very bitchy-demanding and I think he is behaving like an absent-minded, disengaged twit.
But since it IS the Samhain season? I admit to a bit of amusement amidst my ambivalence. This is the time of year when it always seems things go forward of their own inertia without that much actual doing from us. It is the time of sudden happenstance and synchronicity in this household. Working on the bedroom for our returned youngest son this week, it all went so easily as to spook us out. This house is infamous for making us sweat and bleed for every change. But screws found studs, moved furniture fit perfectly, paint did not run out before walls did. So, as a family, we seem to have turned a corner, found the key to unlocking our future?
And because there must be balance, perhaps? I note with amusement that another key turned as well. The one locking up the man his family insists is not crazy, who had led police in Pennsylvania on an unmerry seven week chase! The sport-killer who shot cops for no better reason than to prove he could is caught! It made me smile that he was handcuffed with the cuffs of the man he murdered. And yes, I said superstition and “woo” was in charge of my mind today, right? I’d say his surprise arrest was just my world saying “Don’t fuck with Halloween OR Samhain, you asshole! The kids get to trick-or-treat now and YOUR year of self-aggrandizement is OVER!”
* Samhain is generally pronounced “Sow -in” or some variant thereof. We pronounce it more like “Sah-vein” rather like the Gaelic name for the month of November.
Andrew Sullivan commits a classic rhetorical error.
So let me make a few limited points. The tactics of harassment, threats of violence, foul misogyny, and stalking have absolutely no legitimate place in any discourse. Having read about what has happened to several women, who have merely dared to exercise their First Amendment rights, I can only say it’s been one of those rare stories that still has the capacity to shock me. I know it isn’t fair to tarnish an entire tendency with this kind of extremism, but the fact that this tactic seemed to be the first thing that some gamergate advocates deployed should send off some red flashing lights as to the culture it is defending.
All well and good, but…there’s a “but” coming. It doesn’t really need to be a “but”. And unfortunately, Sullivan throws out a real stinker of a “but”.
Second, there’s a missing piece of logic, so far as I have managed to discern, in the gamergate campaign. The argument seems to be that some feminists are attempting to police or control a hyper-male culture of violence, speed, competition and boobage. And in so far as that might be the case, my sympathies do indeed lie with the gamers. The creeping misandry in a lot of current debates – see “Affirmative Consent” and “Check Your Privilege” – and the easy prejudices that define white and male and young as suspect identities (because sexism!) rightly offend many men (and women).
There’s an atmosphere in which it has somehow become problematic to have a classic white, straight male identity, and a lot that goes with it. I’m not really a part of that general culture – indifferent to boobage, as I am, and bored by violence. But I don’t see why it cannot have a place in the world. I believe in the flourishing of all sorts of cultures and subcultures and have long been repulsed by the nannies and busybodies who want to police them – whether from the social right or the feminist left.
MISANDRY!
Now why wouldn’t anyone want to tone down a culture of violence? And while boobs are lovely, why shouldn’t people keep in mind that they are attached to human beings? This is a very peculiar argument, to suggest that it would be a bad thing to discourage violence and sexism…or at least, to keep it confined to fantasy worlds.
And there’s something even more appalling here. Look what Sullivan unthinkingly does: a culture of “violence, speed, competition and boobage” is “hyper-male”. Expecting affirmative consent and that we all recognize our cultural advantages is “misandry”. And somehow all of these things are tangled up in the “classic white, straight male identity”.
I am a “classic white, straight male”. I think I’m offended that Sullivan believes that I’m supposed to embrace the assholishness of the gamergaters, that somehow my sex and sexual orientation and skin color should make me find common cause with a mob of smug jerks who find amusement in disparaging and objectifying women. I’ve got news for Sullivan: that crap doesn’t go with my identity. The idea that sexism is part of the classic white, straight male identity is a perfect example of the toxic masculinity that feminists have been deploring.
It's too late to vote this year in Hanover, Manitoba, because Election Day was October 22. On the other hand, if your main interest was the referendum on whether to repeal the town's long-standing ban on alcohol sales, don't feel bad, because it turns out the town never actually had a ban on alcohol sales.
Or, at least, nobody can prove it did.
Hanover is a rural municipality southeast of Winnipeg, comprised of about 14,000 people living in five townships and points inbetween. According to a 1982 history by local resident Lydia Penner, the area was set aside for Mennonite immigrants from eastern Europe in the 1870s, but was turned into a municipality in 1881. While some nearby communities voted to repeal alcohol bans over the next century, Hanover never did. In fact, it had held at least one prior referendum on the issue, in 2006, but the repeal measure failed by just 30 votes. The issue came up again this year because a restaurant owner had expressed interest in serving alcohol, so another referendum was prepared.
This time, somebody seems to have actually checked the existing bylaws. Noticing they did not include a ban on alcohol sales, the town hired some lawyers to check further. "We went back to 1880," said the reeve (mayor), Stan Toews, "and we could not find a bylaw that said Hanover is dry."
This was news to him and apparently everyone else. Towes, who is 63, said he had lived in the area his whole life and that the municipality had been "dry" as long as he could remember. Apparently people there have either not been drinking at all, have been traveling to the nearby safe zones to buy alcohol, or have been going to the one convenience store on the edge of town where alcohol was sold. "Municipal officials have left it alone" for decades, the National Post noted, although it turns out they have been turning a blind eye to something that was never illegal.
"It's been there since the early '70s," Towes said, "and I've often asked, 'How did this come about?' But nobody seemed to have the history." And apparently nobody thought (or cared enough) to look for it during the next four decades.
It appears that at least conservative Mennonites do not drink alcohol, so this may be where the idea originated. Penner's history doesn't mention anything about this one way or another, but does note that for decades very few bylaws existed. In fact, only five were passed in the first 30 years. Penner states that for reasons such as language barriers (most spoke only Russian or German) and "their teaching against taking fellow believers to court" (see 1 Corinthians 6), "the Mennonites of Hanover avoided the entire paraphernalia of the legal system as much as possible." In particular, as the minutes of a 1917 meeting record, "the council thinks it is advisable to pass as few by-laws as possible." Herein lies wisdom.
There still are relatively few by-laws in Hanover today, at least judging by its website. After October 22, there are now exactly the same number governing alcohol sales as there were before: zero.
(Via Neatorama.)
On a recent afternoon, Hampus Elofsson ended his 40-hour workweek at a Burger King and prepared for a movie and beer with friends. He had paid his rent and all his bills, stashed away some savings, yet still had money for nights out.
That is because he earns the equivalent of $20 an hour — the base wage for fast-food workers throughout Denmark and two and a half times what many fast-food workers earn in the United States.
“You can make a decent living here working in fast food,” said Mr. Elofsson, 24. “You don’t have to struggle to get by.”
With an eye to workers like Mr. Elofsson, some American labor activists and liberal scholars are posing a provocative question: If Danish chains can pay $20 an hour, why can’t those in the United States pay the $15 an hour that many fast-food workers have been clamoring for?
“We see from Denmark that it’s possible to run a profitable fast-food business while paying workers these kinds of wages,” said John Schmitt, an economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research, a liberal think tank in Washington.
And if those fast food companies are less profitable in Denmark than the U.S., well, good! Companies should have lower profits if that money is going into the hands of workers. This seems self-evident to me, but I know even many liberal Americans have so internalized the logic of modern profit ideology that the idea of lower profits in exchange for better lives for low-paid workers makes many people uncomfortable.
I see that the glitzy behemoth that is the BBC’s Children in Need is hoving into view. I have to confess, I don’t really like it. How can one not support such a manifestly good cause, you may say? Well, I don’t being part of a herd, I don’t like being dragooned, and I don’t like the endless parade of “celebs”. I feel the same with the blooming Red Nose day. Perhaps it is churlish of me. I do, on the other hand, strongly support giving to charities where I know exactly where my money is going. There is a short list; these involve certain local rescue charities for animals, Marie Curie, and the Samaritans – because I have been alone in those wee small hours which pass so slowly and so painfully for some. I will return to this below.
I have spent a fair bit of time apparently doing nothing at all lately. This often involves sitting in one of my favourite cafés, sipping large amounts of fruit tea, and staring into space. In the picturesque Pennines hamlet not too far away there are a couple I frequent. One is run by a gentle couple, Mark and Irene. As Mark often says, he thinks of it more as a public service than a business. It is a quirky place, homely and with a sheltered garden with tables and chairs, in which I can sit and take in the autumn sunshine, or even enjoy the rain under the safety of the large garden umbrella things. I like to see my friends the pair of robins who live there, and I bring them mealworms from time to time. A lovely girl with flame red hair and impossibly porcelain skin works there on the weekend. She looks fragile, but there is a core of steel there; she has just returned from working in an orphanage in India, and that was a tough environment. She was tempted by offers in the modeling world, but had the good sense to back away from the falseness and bitchiness which she encountered. I like her; she has courage.
Across the road is another café with an open courtyard, offering a vista of the high street. They don’t seem to mind my endless requests for pots of cranberry and raspberry infusion.
Am I really doing nothing? In a way it is an active meditation. I reflect on life a little, but not too much. Mainly I am just learning to let go and be of the moment. New thoughts, new perspectives come. It is doing nothing, and yet doing everything. F. Scott Fitzgerald said: life starts all over when it gets crisp in the fall. That sounds counter intuitive, but I can understand it. And this is how I feel, like I am starting over again. It is an odd feeling.
There is another café nearby. On the windswept side of a Pennines hill there is what is called a “pitch and put” golf course, with a traditional old stone building that served as the office and storage hut for some ropey clubs for hire. I used to walk my beloved dog up there when I was a lad. I never really thought the place beautiful, but I have changed my mind now. The course was neglected and run down for a long time, but recently it has been taken over by a new manager, a powerfully built man, an ex rugby league player. He has steadily worked on the course, mowing and tending. It is hardly Wentworth, but the place has a cared for feel about it, with fresh signs and new flags. It has become quite popular again. The old stone building has been cleaned out, and turned into a simple, but homely café. Despite his menacing build, the manager is clearly a good soul, always ready with a greeting and time to chat, and his wife and rather lovely daughters help to run the café when he is out and about tending to his course. I get the impression he is a happy man, content with his lot. He looks very healthy from his outdoor life.
There are some simple tables and chairs outside when the weather is fine. I can sit and drink tea (strong Yorkshire tea, no faddy fruit stuff here) and watch the crazy and incompetent golfers, the occasional riders and the many happy and cared for dogs whose owners take them to play on the neighbouring big field. The air is very fresh, and there is a view which on a good day can stretch to Wales. The sunsets can be magnificent.
I popped in last Saturday. I had intended to go to the gym, but I decided to slack, and do more doing nothing. So, to the café I went. They were running a coffee morning in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support. The daughters had baked amazing cakes (above), and the tiny café was crammed with perhaps twenty visitors. Many had had brought cakes of their own to contribute. It will hardly change the world, and yet it was magnificent. It was a far cry form the hullaballoo and hysteria which I feel surrounds the Beeb’s Children in Need circus. I gave what I could freely. They had hoped to raise £100. They made £211. Bravo.
Another simple thing I have found the time to enjoy is music. I have become a fan of some people who go by the name of “The Piano Guys”. One hearing of a tune on Classic FM and I was entranced by their style of mashing up classic and modern tunes with considerable skill. As a perusal of their videos on youtube shows, they play not just with considerable virtuosity, but passion, verve, mischief and joy and they make rather fun videos to go with their work. Some people are rather sniffy about their style, regarding them as more showbiz than authentic musicians. I don’t care.
Here are a couple of pieces of their work. It may not to be everyone’s tastes but take five minutes to see if it touches you. One piece (Codename Vivaldi) is for piano and cello. The second (Beethoven’s 5 secrets) is for cello and orchestra.
I wish you a peaceful Sunday.
©Gildas the Monk
There are many great lines Justice Fergus O'Donnell's opinion in R. v. Duncan (2013), which was an otherwise unremarkable case except that the defendant tried to run one of those "sovereign citizen" defenses up the flagpole. That didn't go so well:
Thus it was that the trial began with Mr. Duncan objecting to us proceeding on the basis that I had no jurisdiction over him. Mr. Duncan provided me with an “affidavit of truth”, a rather substantial volume that appeared to me to be the result of somebody doing a Google search for terms like “jurisdiction” and the like and then cobbling them together in such a way that it makes James Joyce’s Ulysses look like an easy read. This hodgepodge of irrelevancies relied upon by Mr. Duncan was one of the misbegotten fruits of the internet. Finding it was a waste of Mr. Duncan’s time; printing it was a waste of trees and my reading it was a waste of my time and public money.
Definitely worth a read. Also added to the Case Law Hall of Fame.
Chris Kluwe posts on #gamergate. He’s not nice about it.
Dear #Gamergaters,
Do you know why you piss me the fuck off?
Because you’re lazy. You’re ignorant. You are a blithering collection of wannabe Wikipedia philosophers, drunk on your own buzzwords, incapable of forming an original thought. You display a lack of knowledge stunning in its scope, a fundamental disregard of history and human nature so pronounced that makes me wonder if lead paint is a key component of your diet. You think you’re making piercing arguments when, in actuality, you’re throwing a temper tantrum that would embarrass a three-year-old.
The GamerGaters raged. So much hate. But not much else.
Felicia Day posts on #gamergate. She’s sad and regretful about it.
I have been terrified of inviting a deluge of abusive and condescending tweets into my timeline. I did one simple @ reply to one of the main victims several weeks back, and got a flood of things I simply couldn’t stand to read directed at me. I had to log offline for a few days until it went away. I have tried to retweet a few of the articles I’ve seen dissecting the issue in support, but personally I am terrified to be doxxed for even typing the words “Gamer Gate”. I have had stalkers and restraining orders issued in the past, I have had people show up on my doorstep when my personal information was HARD to get. To have my location revealed to the world would give a entry point for a few mentally ill people who have fixated on me, and allow them to show up and make good on the kind of threats I’ve received that make me paranoid to walk around a convention alone. I haven’t been able to stomach the risk of being afraid to get out of my car in my own driveway because I’ve expressed an opinion that someone on the internet didn’t agree with.
Immediately, some GamerGater posted her home address and phone number.
At last it’s slowly beginning to sink in to them, though, that they’ve driven away most of their support.
For someone who’s sick of the abuse, these 8chan threads are pure schadenfreude:
One: https://archive.today/JASOw
Two: https://archive.today/xnFKyAmong the fallen heroes mentioned: Patton Oswalt, Seth Rogen, Felicia Day, William Gibson, Tim Schafer, cartoonist Mariel Cartwright, Joss Whedon, writer Greg Rucka, Wil Wheaton, writer Jim Sterling, John Scalzi, Adam Sessler, Jon Stewart, and the creators of Raspberry Pi, who came out forcefully against #gamergate.
But at least they’ve still got…Adam Baldwin.
I’ve also noticed something on Twitter: any time I mention this awful #gamergate bullshit, I get a flood of dismissive, insulting comments, and I have to exercise the block button frequently. Usually, I’ll take a look at who this person is: and most often, it’s some account with 0-50 followers, a few hundred (at most) tweets, and if I look at their twitter history, it’s all raging about Social Justice Warriors and #gamergate. The channers have been doing a good job of ginning up lots of fake accounts and making noise on the internet, but they’re all Quaker cannons — ignorable.
Now we just have to persuade the atheist movement that these raving anti-feminists are all bark, have no credibility, and are damaging every group they join.
Ah, I see some GamerGaters are whining to Tor that I am being mean to them. Well, good luck with that tactic, kids.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 23, 2014
So a few days ago, it was suggested to a faction of the hot, pathetic misogynist mess known as GamerGate that launching a boycott of Tor Books was a possible “action op” for them. This was quickly shot down, no doubt in part because the person suggesting it was Theodore Beale, and no one at this point actually gives a crap what he thinks about anything. However, last night I went on another Twitter tear on the subject of GamerGate, and I woke up this morning to a few chuckleheads bleating to Tor about what a terrible person I am, in order to, I don’t know, get Tor to talk to me sternly about having opinions on the Internet, because apparently Tor is my dad. So maybe this push to boycott Tor because of me has legs after all! Hooray!
That said, my takeaway from these furtive attempts to make me shut up about the fact that GamerGate is basically a bunch of terrible human beings being shitty to women, up to and including threatening them and publishing their personal information online in an obvious attempt to silence them is to be just a little bit sad. Not because a few of these human-shaped pieces of ambulatory refuse are trying to do it, but because they’re thinking too small about it.
I mean, seriously, boycotting just Tor Books? Why limit yourself? Sure, it’s the largest publisher of science fiction and fantasy books in North America and possibly the world, but it’s just one imprint of Tom Doherty Associates. There are several other imprints, including Forge, Starscape, Tor Teen and Seven Seas. You should boycott those, too. That’ll show me!
But even then, you’d be thinking too small. Tom Doherty Associates is itself just one appendage of the publishing giant known as Macmillan, with offices in 41 countries! It publishes thousands of books a year! What a target! You should boycott all of Macmillan. Man, I’m quaking in my boots just thinking about it. But even then, it’s small potatoes, for Macmillan is just one part of the mighty Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, with annual sales in the billions of euros. Boycott it all! No doubt all of Stuttgart shall fall into a shambles at the thought.
But even then you are not done, boycotters! For you see, I am crafty and have diversified my revenue stream. I have many publishers and many people I work with. You must punish them all for having me in their midst. All of them. And not just the tiny imprint or sub-company that works with me directly. That’s what a coward would do. And are you a coward? Well, yes, probably, because the tactics of GamerGate have been astoundingly cowardly right from the start. But still! Think big, my friends. Your boycott must not just take out a few targets, it must nuke them all from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
With that in mind, here are your other boycott targets:
In the UK I am published by Gollancz, which is part of Orion Publishing Group, which is in itself part of Hachette, which is part of Lagardère Group. Crush them!
In Germany I am published by Heyne, which is part of Random House, which is itself owned by Penguin Random House, which is jointly owned by Pearson and Bertlesmann. Squish them!
In audio, I am published by Audible, which is owned by Amazon. Surely it is worth giving up your sweet Amazon Prime subscriptions to make Jeff Bezos shake in his chinos!
But wait! We’re still not done. Because as you may know I have TV deals! One is with FX, which is owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, which is part of 21st Century Fox (yes, it’s 21st Century Fox now. Look it up). You will need to boycott it all. Yes, even Fox News. Be strong! It’s for the cause!
Another is with Syfy and Universal Cable Productions, which is part of NBCUniversal, which is itself part of Comcast. So for this one, some of you will have to give up cable, and possibly your Internet connection. Keep your eye on the prize! It will be worth it!
My third TV deal is with Legendary TV, which is part of Legendary Pictures. And you’re thinking, whew, at least they aren’t part of a multinational corporation! True, but they make films that are distributed through a number of film studios, including Warner Bros (basically, all the DC Comics movies) and Universal. They also own both Geek & Sundry and Nerdist Industries. Noooooo! You can’t get your nerd on anymore! Stay focused! Your pain will make victory that much sweeter!
So, in short, in order to effectively punish my business partners for me having thoughts you don’t like, all you need to do is boycott three of the five major US publishers, two of the five major film/television studios (plus selected product of one of the other ones), and the largest single online retailer in the world. Which, well. It will keep you busy, at least.
Which, to be clear, I am fine with. While you are off whining to these corporations about me, perhaps you will be too busy to, you know, threaten death, rape and assault against women who also dare to express thoughts you don’t like. And you know what? I think that’s a fair trade.
So please: If you’re going to boycott a company because of me, at least do it right. Do it big. There are all your targets, laid out for you. Go get ‘em! I’ll be rooting for you, kids!
And in the meantime, just remember this:
If you think threatening women is a legitimate tactic for anything, feel free to stop reading my work. I don't need you or your money.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014
Still true, people. Still true.
Texas Tony Culler
SC Candidate TonyCuller
Well, it’s been quite a week for Anthony P Culler. Culler, a Republican, is challenging Rep Jim Clyburn (D-SC) for South Carolina’s District 6 seat . . .
Clyburn, a popular Democrat in a deep blue district has been serving in Congress since 1993, and as the Assistant Democratic Leader since 2011. He was previously House Majority Whip, serving in that post from 2007 to 2011.
Mr Culler has admitted that this is a David and Goliath match-up. He is a white male Republican running in a district that was—
defined, in the early 1990s, in a deal between state Republicans (mostly white) and Democrats (mostly black) in the South Carolina General Assembly to ensure a majority-black population, known as a majority-minority district. The rural counties of the historical black belt in South Carolina make up much of the district, but it sweeps south to include most of the black precincts in Charleston, and west to include most of the black precincts in Columbia.
Despite the odds, though, Mr Culler has figured out an attention-getting angle to try to juice his chances when the district goes to the polls:
“This is our minority majority district,” Culler said. “It’s the black district. That’s what some people call it. … I’ve got another description for this district, it’s a Christian district.”
“We believe in the way that it’s always been,” Culler continued.
Culler urged voters to turn out on election day and vote for him.
“No matter how many Gremlins there are across this country, we here in the sixth district will stand against it,” Culler said.
Oh. Did I neglect to mention the Gremlins? Well, Mr Culler is Gremlin Man who went on quite a Facebook tear a few days back to bolster his Christian Heterosexual Cred with his constituents. The post was replete with the usual traditional family values, sanctity of marriage, and “God told me to run” yadda yadda. The Gremlins were an artistic flourish that helped ensure the silly thing went viral.
Mission Accomplished! Mr Culler snagged his 15 minutes of Internet fame and then some. When the opportunity arose, Culler doubled-down with a low-rent video follow-up that made everything just that little bit more skeevy. The South Carolina Republican Committee wasted no time throwing Culler under the bus and a Libertarian candidate quickly signed on to take advantage of the fact that Culler had sucked all of the air out of Republicans’ slim chances in the Sixth.
But that’s not really why I’m here. I’ve spent my entire gay life out of the closet, much of it when it was decidedly un-cool. I’m nearly immune to homophobic silliness in my own life, I just despise the negative effect that it still has on LGBT kids and will fight it forever for that reason. The fight is decidedly easier these days because your garden variety homophobe is deservedly considered somewhat moronic by a majority of Americans these days.
What bothers me much more is the fact that our Congress seems to be increasingly viewed as a potential sheltered workshop for unintelligent, inexperienced, sometimes pathological miscreants and political dilletantes more than willing to exploit the public trust for their own personal well-being.
Mr Culler, for instance has a quite colorful history, to be blithely presenting himself as a God-fearing man of principle, a leader, a traditional family values exemplar, etc, etc.
Culler doesn’t say much about his educational or professional qualifications for representing his district in the US House of Representatives. And far be it from me to suggest that an honest, hardworking congressman of integrity needs a diploma or business success to serve the electorate well. On the other hand, the only well documented facts about Tony Culler’s past indicate that he might be the consummate con-man, assisted by his lovely wife Renee who is no slouch herself in that respect.
Culler’s primary ambition, to date, seems to have been to raise his family without the daily inconvenience of a job. When the Cullers lost their home in Nacogdoches, TX for non-payment of their mortgage, back in 2009, they did not view it as an unfortunate downturn from which to recover but, rather, a vast governmental conspiracy against them that extended from the local sheriff to the governor’s office.
The Cullers loaded their now-homeless four daughters into their SUV and started asking for donations to help them. Not to help them get back on their feet, mind you, they were asking for help to fight the “web of corruption” that had singled them out and destroyed their comfortable lives in Texas, where they were able to get by on the proceeds of mineral rights to their property and Mrs Culler’s sporadic employment.
Then the bottom fell out of natural gas, the proceeds dried up, the Cullers mortgage went into foreclosure, and they were ultimately evicted . . . despite the fact that the neighbor who bought the property at sheriff’s sale tried to help them out of their bind by renting their home back to them.
The Cullers weren’t able to pay that rent because they were unwilling to interrupt their crusade against civic corruption with time-consuming jobs.
The course they chose instead? dress up their four young daughters every day, outfit them with protest signs and collection cups, and march them around for hours in the Nacogdoches sun in front of the bank that had foreclosed on their property. Since the Culler girls are home-schooled, I suspect Mr Culler felt that this operation was a great American learning experience for them.
The Cullers, of course sued all of the “corrupt” officials and the bank involved and enlisted a fool to represent them in court—Anthony P Culler. They lost every case and eventually left Texas where their support network began to sag under the Cullers’ daily needs, and took themselves back to South Carolina to throw themselves on the mercy of Mrs Culler’s family. That was when it occurred to the Cullers that they might be able to turn their War on Corruption into a paying gig and both decided to run for Congress.
Mrs Culler went first, then quickly crashed and burned with this sort of amazing performance:
At some point, you just have to feel sorry for the poor sane guy trying to interview her.
Undaunted, Mrs Culler declared the interview a triumph in one of her characteristically rambling Facebook stump speeches:
It was a success!
Many of you have asked me about “comments/rumors” that are circulating since I began my campaign for US Congress. I have already been “warned” by strangers that “Texas would come out if I continue” and that even though my husband and I “may be able to handle it but your girls may not”, I have and will continue my campaign. (These people do not know my girls. And they definitely do not know me. These Cullers DO NOT run!) I tell them, to their absolute dismay; the story of the destruction of my family will be coming out! But I will be the one doing it - my way.
You will be shocked to learn how far up the ladder the corruption in this case goes. This story has the potential to change the Republican Nomination for President! Two of the current nominees - Texas Governor Rick Perry and Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann have personally been made aware of the crimes committed against my family. And both have refused to investigate my family’s Constitutional rights being violated!
Here is my theory on why the crimes, committed under color of law, by Nacogdoches County Sheriff Thomas Kerss and his department, can NEVER be investigated. Here is why he will get “away with it”. (Kerss was also the President of the Sheriff’s Association of Texas, 254 county sheriff departments, at the time of these crimes!)
If Sheriff Kerss is found guilty of committing crimes under color of law (Felonies), then what happens to ALL the cases/convictions that he has participated in as a law enforcement officer? If he becomes a convicted felon, will new trials need to be ordered? Will convictions be overturned? For how many and at what “cost”? (Is that “cost” higher than the loss of one American family’s freedom and liberty? Not to us it isn’t.)
And, big finish:
Has God ever placed you on a journey that you did not understand OR agree with at the time? There was a reason my family was destroyed in Texas and lost EVERYTHING we owned. (Yes EVERYTHING - baby pictures, Christening gowns, all our children’s clothes/toys/home school books, pets, etc.) The reason was to prepare and strengthen me for the United States Congress. It was to make me PERSONALLY AWARE of the existence of corruption in the government and the destructive power of that corruption.
I believe the new 7th Congressional District of South Carolina was formed for me to represent. This is my home and I returned so I could be elected to represent it. It is God’s will and I will not turn from the enormous task he has placed before me. I readily admit that I do not have a campaign staff or the funding for such an operation. But I do have the ability, education, training, work ethic, and the experience necessary to represent the people of the 7th district. I also have God, my husband, my four daughters, and faith that God will provide the rest. I cannot be beaten.
But, sadly, no. The electorate, inexplicably thwarting God’s plan, awarded Mrs Culler only 1.5% of the primary vote.
Now it’s Tony’s turn to try his hand at Congress-ing. Somehow Anthony Culler managed to win the Republican primary for his district, mostly because the district is a Democratic party lock that most Republicans wouldn’t bother with. We already know he’s not going to win this election but it should be interesting to see what the Cullers’ next scam will be. For now, at least, it looks like Congress will be spared the Cullers’ Magical Reality.
Even PeeDee Republicans seem to be on to them:
Nevertheless, voters beware this midterm, it’s dangerous out there.
BTW, Mr Cullers, if you’re reading this? God asked me to give you a message: Get a job, take care of your daughters and STFU. Americans are truly weary of your kind.
Felicia Day. Photo: Cristina Gandolfo.
Gamer and online personality Felicia Day hasn't said much about Gamergate. Today, she opened up on her blog. “Why have I remained mostly silent? Self-protection and fear.” Read the rest
Not all of us can say as much. (via @PuissantLobbyLGBT/Twitter)
What, I ask you, should one expect if one asks artist Paul McCarthy to create a Christmas tree for the place of honor at a renowned, must-attend art fair? Well, it’s Paul McCarthy, so there are only two possible outcomes: a turd or a butt plug.
This year, Paris got a butt plug. A — sah-weeeeet! — whopping, elegantly unembellished, minty green butt plug! Nicer than that gaudy, decked out whore of a tree that New York City erects at Rockefeller Center every year. Even, I’d say, in better taste.
“Of course this work is controversial,” said Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) director Jennifer Flay, “it plays on the ambiguity between a Christmas tree and a plug: this is neither a surprise nor a secret.”
But despite his predictability and rather tasteful, understated delivery, the art world’s most reliably scatological artist managed to shock people with his contribution to FIAC’s “Hors les Murs” (or “Outside the Walls”) sector.
How did that happen?
Artist Paul McCarthy’s gallery coos about the new public work. (via @HauserWirth/Twitter)
In July, Flash Art Online previewed McCarthy’s Chocolate Factory, which would, in October, fill the newly renovated Monnaie de Paris with a giant solo show, and grace Paris’s Place Vendôme with a giant inflatable “Christmas tree.”
The Flash Art story described a “wonderland experience” that “lures” visitors into a “fairytale forest of giant inflatable Christmas trees.”
Without cracking a smile, the article went on to describe an Eyes Wide Shut sort of experience whereby one is drawn by curiosity into a tunnel of increasingly freaky rooms. First “we find a team of confectioners hard at work in a life-size, fully functioning chocolate factory,” and, if we elect to go on after gorging on sweet brown confections, we open doors in a labyrinth of experiences and “a place of endless possibilities” where “reality gives way to the absurd.” The preview was illustrated with an image of a chocolate Santa holding a huge butt plug.
Paul McCarthy’s “Butt Plug Gnome” in Rotterdam, 2012 (photo by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic)
Anyone familiar with McCarthy and equipped with a fully functioning funny bone knows that this is tongue-in-cheek stuff. Just as we knew what those “giant inflatable Christmas trees” would be — after all, we’d seen an example before — we knew what McCarthy thinks of Christmas — his “Santa Claus” in Rotterdam’s Eendrachtsplein Square is popularly known as the “Butt Plug Gnome” — and, similarly, we also knew what “chocolate” would entail.
Yet the grown-ups at Flash Art kept it so serious that most readers likely forgot to take note of the impending plugging of Paris. By the time the pneumatic probe made its stubby appearance alongside the lofty Vendôme Column, we’d all forgotten about it.
That’s the straight man approach to discussing Paul McCarthy. It demonstrates the power of the high-minded to thwart indignity while creating spin for a towering bunghole stretcher.
Those who sell, those who buy, and those who choose what will go on to represent us to future generations and civilizations, those keepers of the cultural keys, know how to keep things clean — no matter how dirty they are. Which is why, dear readers, when it comes to talking about Paul McCarthy, mastering the straight man approach will mark you as a true art world insider.
The Flash Art piece was rivaled in sobriety only by FIAC’s own press release, which presented McCarthy as the artist cherry-picked not only to re-open the venerable Monnaie de Paris — which has been closed for renovation since 2011 — but to represent FIAC’s collaboration with Comité Vendôme — the business association for Paris’s most expensive shopping destination — which every year places large-scale works in Place Vendôme.
The humorless press release droned:
An exquisite location with elegant stone façades lining its four sides, the square represents the excellence of craftsmanship in service to art. Here, visitors can discover an exceptional in situ project by Paul McCarthy, in association with the Monnaie de Paris.
The phrase “in situ” alone should have set off a major snicker alert. But buried in a press release full of grand announcements and decorated with lists of power players, it raised no eyebrows at all.
If imagining all that staid architecture sharing space with McCarthy’s “exceptional in situ project” did not make you laugh, good for you: You have already half-mastered the straight man approach!
But there’s another way to talk about Paul McCarthy.
Instagram photo by @phil_a_paname
Cut to October 2014, when the hilarity of FIAC’s plans became suddenly evident by the looming presence of a giant green butt plug in the revered Place Vendôme. Headlines, tweets using #Vendome or #buttplug or #PlugGate, and Instagram photos of playful tourists lewdly “interacting” with the piece immediately lit up the internet with oafish, down-and-dirty, dime-a-dozen puns.
This is the funnyman approach, marked by puerile vulgarity —and banishment from the market.
Those who wish to court collectors, auction houses, or museums are not allowed to cave into the maddening urge to elbow-nudge viewers and readers. But for those who live in the margins (“Paul McCarthy’s XXXmas Tree Plugs Up Paris,” quipped our own Hrag Vartanian) it’s a release equivalent to drawing a dick in a library book and giggling, red-faced, behind the stacks.
The market-free, dogma-free masses can unapologetically indulge in full-throated hilarity when faced with a brilliantly colored sex toy squatting rudely on the Place Vendôme.
Paul McCarthy’s “Brancusi Tree” at Home Alone Gallery in 2012 (photo by Benjamin Sutton for Hyperallergic)
The bottom line is this: A professional art speaker will not cave to fatuous cracks about seminal works!
For one of the finest examples of a stiff upper lip at work, get a load of the good folks writing copy for the FIAC website, keeping things civilized:
Towering at almost 25 meters on the Place Vendôme is Paul McCarthy’s “Tree,” a site specific sculpture conceived in relation to his concurrent exhibition Chocolate Factory at the Monnaie de Paris, his first major solo exhibition in Paris. A reference to both modernist sculpture and the iconic Christmas tree of western culture, McCarthy’s sculpture stands proudly to celebrate his presence finally in Paris and alludes to the chocolate figurines his factory produces.
True, sometimes a giant sex toy is just a giant sex toy, but sometimes it is — take it from the artist himself — “more of an abstraction”:
It all started with a joke: Originally I thought that the anal plug was shaped like a Brancusi sculpture. Then I thought that it resembled a Christmas tree. But it’s an abstract work. People who find it offensive call it a plug, but for me it’s more of an abstraction.
John Curtin College of the Arts (photo by @alisonspence/Instagram)
Two art students in their final year at the John Curtin College of the Arts in Perth, Western Australia, got an unexpected lesson in institutional politics after their paintings were censored in a student exhibition. The mother of one of the teenage artists, Vicky Manley, says the school removed her daughter’s painting because the administration believes it depicts a fellow student nude and could incite pedophilic behavior in viewers, according to Western Australia Today. Another student was told that her artwork, which depicts two women kissing, would be turned to face the gallery wall at times when young children might see the work.
“My daughter accessed several images, as well as her imagination to create the artwork … It is not an actual portrait of the young girl that the principal is referring to. If it were then it would have been titled as such,” Manley told WAT.
The school’s administration claims that its decision to remove the work by Manley’s daughter from the forthcoming student exhibition, slated to run November 4–7, has nothing to do with nudity per se, but specifically the painting’s apparent portrayal of another student, nude, in a figurative style that makes her instantly recognizable. The exact nature of the other targeted artwork’s offense is unclear, but according to a Change.org petition calling for the works to be reinstated, “both artworks depicted some form of nudity and alluded to female sexuality.”
“This is certainly not an issue of art censorship, we simply cannot display images of a recognizable person who is naked and underage,” the school’s principal, Mitchell Mackay, told the Guardian Australia. “Both of these paintings are outstanding pieces of work by our students, but in both cases there are particular circumstances we have had to consider to ensure they do not put children at risk.”
The second work will be turned to face the gallery wall when the Curtin Theatre — in whose foyer the exhibition is being held — hosts performances of the Disney musicals The Little Mermaid and Pinocchio. Mackay told WAT that the decision to censor his students’ work was made “purely with the protection of children in mind.”
Dynasty Handbag performing ‘Soggy Glasses: A Homo’s Odyssey’ at BAM (all photos by Rebecca Smyne, courtesy BAM)
Nine o’clock: the stage lights dim and a spotlight illuminates a stuffed “hero” sandwich the size of a small sofa. The opening melody of Tina Turner’s “We Don’t Need Another Hero” — hit theme song from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome — fills BAM’s Fishman Space. A face peeks out from between the parted curtains, and then a vividly strange figure appears, dancing in a flesh-toned spandex bodysuit to a wave of delighted laughter. So begins Soggy Glasses: A Homo’s Odyssey, Dynasty Handbag’s first evening-length performance piece, which premiered this past Friday night.
The performance persona of artist Jibz Cameron, Dynasty Handbag possesses a physical humor that’s instantaneous and irresistible. It wasn’t her gigantic fannypack or hairspray-tortured coif that made the audience laugh; the smart absurdity of Dynasty’s gestures and facial expressions have an effect akin to Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick, mixed with the gorgeous grotesquerie of the late, great Divine — and a nimbleness that is all Cameron’s own. Soggy Glasses, a feminist-queer interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey, is the most recent of in a series of Cameron’s work that re-envisions canonical male epics (Hell in A Handbag took on Dante’s Inferno; Vertitigo skewed Hitchcock’s tough-guy detective story through an absurdist female lens). Soggy Glasses satirizes both Homer’s master narrative and the third-wave feminist suspicion that leads Cameron to critique it. The subtlety of this critique-on-critique is part of what makes her work so funny.
Dynasty Handbag performing ‘Soggy Glasses: A Homo’s Odyssey’ at BAM
The show consists of Dynasty conversing with animated characters on a video screen — all of which are drawn and voiced by Cameron — as she makes a perilous journey through her own internal organs. Her vessel is the paper container that formerly held the giant hero sandwich. The creatures and places she encounters include a cave guarded by a hipster would-be cyclops (“I’m not a cyclops, I just present that way”), an angel guide in the form of a disembodied Yoko Ono, and a lisping snake who runs an artist’s residency in her colon (the “Artist Colon-y”). The story is dense with pop culture references, many of them decidedly masculine: at one point, Cameron narrates Dynasty’s progress in a fake Werner Herzog accent; at another, “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath knells our anti-hero’s imminent failure at making a great work of art. This thicket of references brings up a question: how much of an artist’s sensibility is informed by the culture that she lives in, and how much of it grows from her own organic strangeness? In Soggy Glasses, Cameron’s singular oddity interweaves freely with popular media, to pleasurably disorienting effect.
Dynasty Handbag performing ‘Soggy Glasses: A Homo’s Odyssey’ at BAM (click to enlarge)
Humor is famously one of the most difficult valences to define, perhaps because much of what we find hilarious hinges on real suffering. Dynasty ultimately fails in Soggy Glasses to make the heroic return that Odysseus made, but she triumphs in her own failure with a fist-pumping reprise of “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” Throughout the performance, she meditates on her own depression, loneliness, and hopelessness. These reflections serve self-mythologizing and self-parodying purposes, but they also speak to an authentic experience of pain. Cameron’s ventriloquism put me in mind of Robin Williams, whose recent death is an example of the darkness that often accompanies comic genius. Dynasty’s tacit examination of suffering allowed me, as an audience member, to trust her while facing the lived experience of despair. This gave the comedy a depth that lasted after the laughter had died away.
I think of Dynasty’s theater-of-the-self as a solid 21st-century evolution of the camp sensibility defined by Susan Sontag in her well-known 1964 essay on the subject. Cameron’s seamless performance bears all of the wit, seduction, and extravagance that Sontag cited as necessary for the elusive creation of camp, but she breaks from Sontag’s dictum that camp be “disengaged, depoliticized — or at least apolitical.” Cameron’s handling of contemporary politics — around gender specifically — reveals the true absurdity of political and social oppression, without ignoring how high the stakes really are.
Dynasty Handbag performing ‘Soggy Glasses: A Homo’s Odyssey’ at BAM
In the piece’s climactic penultimate moment, the capsizing of Dynasty’s sandwich-boat is dramatized by a clip from the blockbuster The Perfect Storm. Cameron pauses in the midst of the catastrophe to note that Linda Greenlaw, the female swordfishing captain, is portrayed in the film primarily through her codependent love relationship with “caretaking George Clooney.” This is one of numerous instances of Cameron showing the elisions of real female heroism that happen in pop culture texts — and if they happen in pop culture, they certainly happen in other realms. The last 50 years of feminist and queer performance art, music, film, and literature have given us many individuals who call out these elisions with intelligent humor, from John Waters to Bikini Kill to Wayne Koestenbaum to Big Freedia. If Soggy Glasses is any indication, Dynasty Handbag is an important force in the visioning of what we, as a culture, consider avant-garde, heroic, and hilarious.
Soggy Glasses: A Homo’s Odyssey took place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Pl, Fort Greene, Brooklyn) on October 17 as part of the performance art showcase Brooklyn Bred.
A man in Middlesborough, England, was jailed for possessing "prohibited images of children" -- even though the images in question were cartoon drawings.
Read the rest
From Alana Jones-Mann, a baker, culinary artist and DIY enthusiast in Brooklyn, cupcakes that look like miniature cacti. They're so cute, they're even planted in crushed graham cracker soil.
The mainstream media finally discovered the Internet's latest subculture of hostile, cynical, easily-led youngsters. Matt Binder on the narcissists, grifters and creeps arriving in its wake. Read the restRecently Miss Pearl wrote an excellent rant about douchebags who try whine and cry about not being allowed into age restricted munches, which you should absolutely read. To very briefly summarize her point, if you know perfectly goddamn well that the rules of an event exclude you and you try to force your way in anyway, you have just conclusively proven that you are an asshole who will ignore the rules to get what they want.
Following the rules at a kinky event is vitally important because doing so signals that you give a shit. When you show up to an event you aren’t welcome at, you are proving that you cannot be trusted to follow an extremely simple rule. This naturally leads people to wonder if you would give a shit if they used their safeword, or told you they didn’t want you to penetrate any of their orifices, or that their hand is going numb and they need the ropes loosened. If I have to wonder that about a person, I don’t want them anywhere remotely fucking near me.
It doesn’t even matter what the rules of the event are or how unfair you believe they are. There is simply no way to show up at an event you aren’t welcome at without looking like a tremendous asshole. And if you’re going to try to convince anyone you didn’t know you weren’t welcome, just fucking stop. All you’re proving at that point is that you’re too stupid to read the rules. Munches with any sort of attendance restriction, whether it’s under 35s only or female subs only, are reliably very clear about who is welcome. This is because you are not the first special fucking snowflake who tried to get in. You can disagree, you can tell all of your friends what a big Meaniepants McPoopyhead the organizer is, but you cannot claim the rules weren’t clearly stated. Protip: proving that you’re too stupid to actually read the rules is not much more confidence inspiring than proving that you just don’t care about the rules.
As for the idiots who cry about ageism, I have a question for you:
How would you feel if the shoe was on the other foot? Imagine that the vast majority of people at the all ages munches were under 25. Would you maybe feel the least bit out of place going to an event like that if you were over 35? Might you start thinking that it would be nice to have an event where you could talk with people who understood when you said you had to get home and pay the babysitter, or that you couldn’t go to that awesome weekend conference because the roof needs to be repaired?
Oh, you don’t have anything to say? I’m shocked.
My local TNG group doesn’t have any hard and fast age limits, but it is intended for people 18 – 35. I’m only 31, and I’m already starting to wonder why on earth a 35+ year old would even want to go to a TNG munch. The people who go to that munch are perfectly lovely and the organizers are personal friends of mine, but it’s getting hard for me to relate to people in their early 20s. It’s been a long time since I had to worry about final exams or the price of textbooks (which are completely fucked up), and I feel like a complete asshole bitching about the job that pays me more than enough to live on to people who are staring down the barrel of years of debt.
Also, I would be shocked to hear of a TNG munch that didn’t give people who are just over the maximum age a little bit of wiggle room. I’m certainly too lazy to immediately throw people out on their 36th birthday. For that matter, if you’re there supporting an under 35 friend or partner who didn’t want to go by themselves, I would be very surprised if you weren’t welcome as long as you made an effort to behave yourself.
On the other hand, if you’re 39 (for example) and you want to hang out with people in their late teens/early 20s, I really do have to question your motives. Sure, it’s possible that you’re new to the scene, want to hang out with other people who are probably new (note that 18-35 munches don’t necessarily assume that you’re new, just that you want to hang out with people roughly your own age) and for some weird reason think that spending time with people in their early 20s won’t be awkward, but sad to say it’s more likely that people your own age won’t take your bullshit.
Before people flip their shit, please pay attention to the fact that I did not say that people over the age of 35 are inherently creepy and bad. I said that people over the age of 35 who want to go to a munch specifically for 18-35 year olds are sketchy as fuck. If you are over 35 and would never dream of crashing a munch where you aren’t welcome, you’re golden! If you are attracted to younger people but don’t want to creep them out by disregarding simple rules, you’re great! If you love the idea of “corrupting” someone young and innocent, I promise there are plenty of young, “innocent” people who jerk off to the idea of being “corrupted” by a bad, bad, <gender of their choice>. They might even play with you if you put that giant red flag down and start acting like a decent human being.
